Carter is 10
Reflections on the Supreme Court of Canada's best decision
Great news! The Toronto Bioethics Workshop will be back this year on May 23rd and 24th. This year’s theme is public bioethics and our keynote speaker will be Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Katie Engelhart, who writes about medicine and ethics as a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Katie is also the author of The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die. More info and the call for abstracts can be found here. The abstract deadline is Friday, February 15th, so get writing!
On this day ten years ago, the Supreme Court of Canada decided Carter, which struck down the general prohibition on assisted dying.
I’m sure you’ve all thought about which Supreme Court decision you would bring if you were going to be stuck on a desert island. For me, it’s Carter. The decision was unanimous, and the reasons for judgment were written by The Court instead of a single justice. The writing itself is the high watermark of former Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin’s court: clear, thorough, and linear.
Carter’s core claim is that the complete ban on assisted dying violated section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which recognizes the right to life, liberty, and security of the person. Although striking down the prohibition on assisted dying was a big change, the decision itself follows from well-accepted principles. We get to decide for ourselves how we wish to live, or even whether we want to continue living. Quoting another decision, the justices recognize that we have the “right to make fundamental personal choices free from state interference”. Medicine is a means for living in accordance with our values, and we get to decide how we want to live.
As I’ve reflected on Carter over the past couple weeks, one theme I keep coming back to is that, every once in a while, it’s possible for a handful of people to make a big difference. People increasingly feel that the problems of the world are too big, that they can’t make a difference. Sometimes they’re right. But Carter happened because a small group of people worked like hell, without pay, because they saw a way to make Canada a better place. That story should be better known.
There’s lots more work to do, both on assisted dying and in many other areas. Choose your thing and get going.
Many people don't realize that Canadians have had a right to die, including to die by suicide, since the government of Pierre Trudeau amended the Criminal Code to remove suicide as a crime. That's because constitutional rights are essentially negative rights, they prevent the government from interfering with our choices. However, Trudeau's amendment left intact the crime of assisting someone to commit suicide. The Carter decision narrowed the range of that criminal offence. I have advocated removing assisted suicide from the Criminal Code entirely, because if we have a right to die and need help in doing so why should the government interfere in that?