Senators bow to government on Bill C-14

A government motion accepting some of the Senate’s more minor amendments but rejecting the primary change must now be debated and voted upon in the Commons before the bill returns again to the upper chamber. Or they could defeat the bill outright.

“As it stands, Bill C-14 will force individuals stricken with catastrophic diagnoses to test whether this bill respects their right to die in peace and dignity”, Gokool said.

The legislation was needed after a Supreme Court decision in February 2015 that struck down Canada’s ban on the practice on the grounds that it violated Charter rights.

The Canadian government has approved its assisted dying legislation, after the Senate backed off a bid to expand access beyond those who suffer from a terminal illness.

The amendment would also replace the bill’s restrictive eligibility criteria with the more permissive parameters spelled out previous year in the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling, which struck down the ban on medical assistance in dying. It could reinsert Joyal’s amendment, and send the bill back to the House.

“It is crucial to keep in mind that Bill C-14 was carefully and deliberately crafted as a cohesive and balanced regime”, Wilson-Raybould told the Commons.

Among other things, the other amendments would put a two-year deadline on the government’s promise to study whether to extend the right to assisted dying to mature minors and people suffering exclusively from mental illnesses, and whether to allow people with competence-eroding conditions like dementia to make advance requests for an assisted death.

He also pointed out there is room for physicians to exercise judgment on what “reasonably foreseeable” death actually is.

The Liberals objected that the amendment “would eliminate from participation the family members or friends most likely to be present ‎at the patient’s express wish, and this would violate patient autonomy in a fundamental and inacceptable manner”. “It was quite clear that Canadians were comfortable with assisted suicide being illegal”. “Bill C-14 represents a breach of that promise”.

But the Supreme Court Carter decision placed this in “Parliament’s lap”, he said, adding that there will be “a lot of consequences coming down the pike in the foreseeable future”.

Heath Minister Jane Philpott warned she is “hoping (senators) will realize that it’s important to get a piece of federal legislation in place as soon as possible”, considering the Supreme Court’s revised deadline for legislation came and went on June 6.

“We do not exist in a legislative vacuum at this time”, he said.