The House of Commons bounced the assisted dying bill back into the Senate’s court Thursday, rejecting an amendment that would have allowed suffering Canadians who aren’t near death to get medical help to end their lives.
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The Senate approved the legislation 44-28 Friday after it earlier was passed by the House of Commons.
The law received royal assent on Friday evening. The bill was voted through after a final bid by senators failed to expand the scope of who qualifies for a doctor-assisted death.
Canada’s Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said the outcome is a right-to-die law that reflects ‘the best public-policy choice on an incredibly sensitive and transformative issue, ‘ according to the Wall Street Journal.
The independent Liberal senator hasn’t given up on finding a way to quickly test whether it’s constitutional to exclude Canadians suffering intolerably from non-terminal medical conditions from the right to seek medical assistance to end their lives.
For his part, Joyal launched into an emotional plea for Senators to stand up for minority rights by supporting his amendment, and pointed to Japanese internment during WWII, and the Immigration Act, which stripped “Jews from access to the country”.
Her amendment requiring that people with an underlying mental condition undergo a psychiatric assessment for competency when requesting euthanasia or assisted suicide, was defeated in the Senate.
That amendment replaces 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.
Parliament’s two houses have been at odds over the phrase in the government’s bill that restricts eligibility for a medically assisted death to those whose natural death is “reasonably foreseeable”.
“(Philpott) and I are confident that the original language in Bill C-14 strikes the necessary and appropriate balance … in balancing personal autonomy and eligibility for medical assistance in dying with the necessary and fundamental protections that need to be in place to protect vulnerable people”, Wilson-Raybould said.
“The court mind is already very fresh on this so it’s not an issue whereby we’d have to wait years and years”, he said in an interview.
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.
But the government’s legislative response, in Bill C14, says only patients suffering from an incurable illness whose natural death is “reasonably foreseeable” are eligible.
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Support for the amended bill was not as overwhelming as the raw numbers suggest. Find us on Facebook too!
