I was reading my morning paper while consuming a cup of the only substance that gets me through early mornings (coffee, obviously) when I came across this headline in the National Post:
Quebec to legalize assisted suicide;
Death a medical issue, health
minister says
It’s a headline that immediately caught my interest; ever since my preliminary studies of dystopian novels, along the veins of 1984, Brave New World, etc., in high school literature, the subject of euthanasia has become this eerie kind of fascination for me. I love getting into debates about the slippery slope that human morality supposedly starts to descend when we start making judgements like those related to a persons right to life or death. My take on assisted suicide, like my take on abortion, has always been a more pro-choice approach with a libertarian leaning. In this sense, I do not criticize those who are pro-life, but I do think that they should not be able to limit others’ rights to make their own decision on the matter, which, often, pro-life policies do. Thus, I view Quebec’s impending legalization of assisted suicide as a progressive move on the part of their provincial legislature, although it brings to the foreground questions concerning Canadian federalism that I am sure not all of you will find very exciting to address. In the well known Sue Rodriquez case (1993), wherein the aforementioned fought to have the ‘right to die’ via assisted suicide after being diagnosed with ALS, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled 5-4 against her. More recently, in 2010, when the topic was brought to the Canadian legislature, the ruling was upheld.
However, despite the federal government’s decisive opposition to legalizing assisted suicide, Quebec’s provincial legislature has done so. While this is not a policy matter that would, say, be a determinant in measuring the democracy, I cannot help but wonder what it says about the dynamics of Canadian federalism if Quebec, as a province, is unilaterally able to make a decision that violates a previous decision made by the federal Supreme Court. While I understand that health care has historically been under provincial jurisdiction, should exceptions not arise when the federal Supreme Court has set forth a legal precedent declaring the unconstiuttionality of this particular aspect of health care (if it can even be considered as such)? Any thoughts?