Senate passes doctor-assisted death legislation

The Liberals have signaled that they plan to send the bill back to the senate as originally written.

The Liberal government says it will reject a proposal made in the Senate to broaden physician-assisted dying to include patients who are not at the end of life.

It was approved with a vote of 44-28.

The Senate could vote on it, again, as early as tomorrow.

The Senate amended the bill to delete that stipulation, and the House rejected the amendment when it passed the bill Thursday.

Nevertheless, numerous senators continued to urge the government to refer the bill to the top court, to test whether the restrictive eligibility criteria complies with the parameters the court set out in last year’s Carter decision.

Assisted suicide is now legal in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Albania, Colombia and Japan. On behalf of the Government of Canada, we acknowledge the depth and quality of the work that our honourable colleagues in the Senate undertook in their review of Bill C-14. He called it a “Canadian compromise”.

But Joyal, an acknowledged constitutional authority in his own right, says he’s now contemplating urging one of the provinces to initiate a court reference to its provincial court of appeal.

The law was originally proposed after Canada’s Supreme Court overturned a ban on doctor-assisted suicide in 2015.

“I believe Canadians are more vulnerable”, he said. It was added “but the government will answer to the people for that error”.

In a statement, the BC Civil Liberties Association, which fought in the initial Supreme Court legal challenge, said the government’s legislation “allows terminal patients to ease their death with a doctor’s assistance, but eliminates the right of non-terminal patients to escape years and decades of torturous pain”.

“Your responsibility is to stand for the minorities”, Joyal told his colleagues on Friday. Baker emphasized the word “democracy” several times when quoting from the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, saying Canada is a country where “people are elected to make our laws”.

“This Senate can not and must not allow itself to be intimidated”.

“We’ve done that to them today”, he said.

New Senator Murray Sinclair argued when it comes to expanding eligibility, “we should move slowly … and incrementally”. “And every one of those will not be able to request doctor assisted dying because they won’t be mentally competent”.

Some senators, including government representative Peter Harder, voted for it rather than risk having the bill defeated altogether.

Friday’s debate dipped into the weighty debate about what role the Senate should play in helping craft Canada’s laws.