May 24, 2016 Newsletter

The draft medical assistance in dying bill has overly restrictive criteria that will leave entire classes of people without access to an assisted death. Dying With Dignity Canada and the BC Civil Liberties Association, our allies in the fight for greater recognition of personal autonomy, have begun calling for the bill to be defeated.

While it’s easy to let the perfect become the enemy of the good, in this case good just isn’t good enough. No law is better than a flawed law.

The Supreme Court of Canada was clear: People who are suffering from a grievous and irremediable illness have the right to choose an assisted death. That decision does not have qualifications about a “reasonably foreseeable” death, nor does it restrict mature minors or people with mental illnesses from making that choice. It also doesn’t preclude making that decision through an advance directive.

If this bill passes in its current form, the people excluded by the Government’s assisted dying bill will be forced to once again turn to the courts to defend their rights. This means more time, more money and more suffering for those who’ve made their wishes abundantly clear.

On June 6 assisted dying becomes legal in Canada. The Government, however, is treating that date as an absolute deadline to push through its legislation. It has resorted to different procedural tricks to force the bill through - some of these tricks go farther than ones the previous government used to limit and silence debate over its more controversial legislation.

Over the past week this pressure has led to increasingly desperate antics by opposition Members of Parliament and the Prime Minister himself. This has delayed the bill's timeline and given us more time to make our case for Parliamentarians to reform - or outright reject - the flawed legislation.

Please write to your MPs and Senators one more time and ask them to stand up for choice and dignity.