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At last, Senate’s doing its job

June 16, 2016   ·   0 Comments

AFTER YEARS OF ACCOMPLISHING little, apart from bad publicity over its members’ spending habits, Canada’s Senate is finally performing the way its founders no doubt envisioned, as a chamber of “sober second thought.”

The occasion, of course, is its careful examination of the Trudeau government’s bill on doctor-assisted dying, which cleared the House of Commons mere days before the June 6 deadline set by the Supreme Court of Canada for a law to replace the Criminal Code’s provision outlawing euthanasia.

With the Code provision now gone and the medical community guided only by a law in Quebec and provincial policies modelled on the Supreme Court’s suggestions, the Senate is taking its time studying the contentious issue, thus far having proposed one major change in the government’s Bill C-14 and considered a wide range of other, less significant changes.

The major change is the elimination of a phrase in C-14 that permitted euthanasia only if the patient’s death was “reasonably forseeable.”

No such restriction was recommended by the top court, and critics of C-14 say this means the legislation could be ruled unconstitutional because it would still bar doctors from euthanizing someone facing intolerable pain but not reasonably forseeable death.

Health Minister Jane Philpott told reporters last week that she was “personally concerned” at the Senate’s broadening of access to euthanasia without adding new safeguards for patients who are not terminally ill. She said it “raises concerns amongst vulnerable populations,” including those with mental illness. “I am personally concerned about the lack of safeguards.”

Her position was supported Monday by Globe and Mail columnist Konrad Yakabuski.

“What has troubled me most as Canada moves to legalize physician-assisted death is the fatalism of those, including some senators, who argue for the broadest access possible to the ‘procedure.’ That’s fine for those who are certain in their choice of death. But who is ever really sure they want to die? Given the options available – intolerable physical or psychological pain, total dependence on others for care – it’s understandable that some would choose to hasten death. The Supreme Court correctly decided that consenting adults in this situation should be able to do so with medical help. But that shouldn’t mean the state should encourage it.”

The columnist offered insight based on his own experience.

“In the early 1990s, I watched several friends and a brother suffer through, and eventually die from, the devastating effects of AIDS. As one opportunistic infection after another ravaged their immune-suppressed bodies, many of them might have chosen doctor-assisted death, had it been legally available, rather than endure the cruelty with which the disease was destroying their young lives. But they died with dignity, the old-fashioned way.

“Another group of HIV-infected friends and acquaintances was luckier. Despite what was then considered a fatal diagnosis, they managed to live long enough to see the introduction of a so-called triple-cocktail drug therapy in 1996. Almost overnight, they went from being emaciated skeletons near death to becoming healthy and productive citizens. This ‘Lazarus effect’ was the result of highly active antiretroviral therapy that turned HIV infection into a chronic but manageable condition. No one saw that dramatic development coming, certainly not as quickly as it did.” He went on to suggest the same sort of thing is happening in the field of mental illness, a new class of antidepressants having turned “previously hopeless and dysfunctional sufferers of depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder into happy and productive members of society.” Urging the politicians to “go slow with this,” he suggested the Supreme Court may “have inadvertently encouraged some people suffering from grievous and irremediable conditions to opt for physician-assisted death out of hopelessness or because they no longer want to burden their caregivers.”

Hopefully, the Senate and Commons will ultimately come up with a compromise that broadens the access while providing needed safeguards against abuses.

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