Effective Monday, June 6, Canadians and their physicians must make, case-by-case, end of life decisions in the absence of law to direct them.
This applies in Didsbury as much as anywhere else in Canada.
This legal chaos is the result of a decision by the Supreme Court of Canada in February 2015 to strike down a law that criminalized participation in assisted suicide.
The court set June 6, 2016 as the deadline for the federal government to enact a new law to correct the injustice of legally withholding doctor assisted suicide from critically ill Canadians who faced “severe and intolerable” suffering.
Last week, the House of Commons passed Bill C-14 which provides that Canadians seek a doctor's assistance to end their life when they suffer from a “grievous and irredeemable” medical condition that leaves them in a state of “irreversible decline” when natural death is “reasonably foreseeable.”
The bill is now bogged down in debate in the Senate – an institution with zero moral authority now holding up the legal resolution of the most sensitive moral and legal question of the day.
The Alberta government has added to the fog with its hastily prepared guidelines for its dealings with the federal government on this matter.
The matter now defaults to a literally lawless situation in which it is up to a willing physician and a willing patient, surrounded by a (hopefully) willing family – to opt for assisted dying.
When Bill C-14 finally becomes law it will face a period of legal review.
Already the law has been challenged in Alberta where the Court of Appeal, in reviewing an assisted death request, noted that the 2015 Supreme Court ruling does not say a patient asking a doctor for help with dying does not need to be suffering from a terminal illness.
I have had close friends with terminal illnesses whose medical suffering was so excruciating that I could not counter argue their wish to die.
I have had the closest of loved ones who rejected out of hand the option of assisted dying until cancer, with its pain, had run its course.
As many, perhaps most, other adult Canadians I know first hand how a well-crafted assisted dying law could be merciful, kind and loving.
Equally as grave as the legal crisis we find ourselves in this week is the moral chaos that this situation creates.
Canada has become a nation without a moral compass. A disturbing number of citizens consider the idea of shared moral compasses intrusive.
A good assisted dying law needs a moral and ethical compass because it is a moral and ethical choice to make such a law.
It should protect medical practitioners who decline to be involved in it.
It should protect a patient's choice to rely on it when their physician declines to give the relief the law would offer.
These are also moral and ethical choices.
Moral and ethical issues belong in the public arena not in some back room.
To fully address them, however, society needs a moral compass.
