Canada’s laws prohibiting assisted suicide are once again being challenged in court in a landmark case that began this week.
Five plaintiffs, including a 63-year-old woman suffering from a fatal neurodegenerative disease and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, have filed a claim against Canada in the province’s Supreme Court, arguing that the current laws prohibiting assisted suicide for seriously and incurably ill patients are unconstitutional.
Lee Carter and Hollis Johnson, two of the plaintiffs who helped Carter’s ill mother, diagnosed with spinal stenosis, travel to a clinic in Switzerland to perform physician-assisted suicide, will also be providing evidence in the case. The couple wants to avoid the risk of being prosecuted under the current laws in Canada.
Groups opposed to legalization of euthanasia have been mobilizing their efforts to keep the laws unchanged. The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC), which has intervenor standing in the case, is calling legalization of assisted suicide “a recipe for elder abuse and a threat to individual patients’ rights.”
“I see elder abuse in my practice, often perpetrated by family members and caregivers. A desire for money or an inheritance is typical,” Will Johnston, a Vancouver physician and chair of the British Columbia chapter of EPC, said in a statement.
“Under current law, abusers take their victims to the bank and to the lawyer for a new will. With legal assisted suicide, the next stop would be the doctor’s office for a lethal prescription,” the statement said.
Both the federal government and the British Columbia provincial government are against changing the law.
In the first constitutional challenge on the issue back in 1993, Supreme Court judges voted in a close 5-4 majority to uphold the existing laws prohibiting euthanasia.
Jonathan Maryniuk, an associate with Kuhn LLP, a firm that practices constitutional law, explains that while legal issues surrounding the topic have remained more or less the same since then, the world has changed.
Physician-assisted suicide is now legal in a number of jurisdictions, including several European countries and a patchwork of American states. Oregon and Washington allow the practice, and in at least five other states—North Carolina, Utah, Wyoming, Ohio, and Virginia—it is not a criminal act.
“Both sides will look at places where it is legalized and look at their track record,” says Maryniuk.
“On one hand, you will have lawyers arguing that the ’sky hasn’t fallen' as a result of such legislation and the safeguards in other jurisdictions’ legislation have worked. On the other hand, the government has an interest in upholding its duly passed legislation, which, at its core, was designed to protect and maintain the dignity of life.”
Maryniuk says Canadian courts are also showing more “openness” in using social science to guide their decisions.
“If the court decides that the current law violates the charter, it will look to this evidence to base their decision on and set adequate boundaries and protections on how assisted suicide might be carried out. It may also decide based on this evidence that there is too much opportunity for abuse.”
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