Last week, the Supreme Court struck down laws prohibiting assisted suicide in Canada, thereby giving to many Canadians what they believe will be a solution to what are often heart-wrenching circumstances. The fact that I don’t agree with the Supreme Court’s decision in no way diminishes the empathy I feel for the physical and emotional suffering so many face as they near the end of their lives. My family has faced that situation more than once.
I disagree with the decision because it places Canada at the top of that slippery slope down which so many proponents of assisted suicide insist we will not slide. But slide we will, just as other societies have, who began by enacting laws aimed at relieving suffering and who are now ridding themselves of the weak, the incompetent and the unwanted.
According to an editorial published in the February edition of The Interim, written by National Affairs editor Rory Leishman, long before last week’s Supreme Court decision was rendered, the Ontario Research Chair in Bioethics at Queen’s University, Udo Schuklenk, was quoted as saying that he found “little support today, in Canada, for making assisted dying available to treatment-resistant incompetent depressed people, very young children and people who are incompetent, for instance, due to mental illness . . . deeply problematic…” (my emphasis)
One day – likely sooner than later – when people like Schulkenk have their way, the weak, the incompetent and the unwanted won’t trouble society anymore. We’ll systematically kill them.
This is the kind of social engineering we can expect – indeed, have already seen – when the Supreme Court of Canada and not the Parliament of Canada makes law. Under Chief Justice Beverley McLaughlin, the Court has once again reminded Canadians that it is the preeminent policy law-making body in the country. It has done so in the past – most tragically in the case of abortion. Its power derives from the Constitutional Act of 1982, which includes a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and which became the preeminent law of the land. Under the Constitutional Act – a dubious gift from former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau – parliament became virtually redundant. It was replaced by the tyranny of an unelected, ermine-wearing elite, who clearly care nothing about the sanctity of life. They cared nothing about it in 1988, when they struck down Canada’s abortion laws, paving the way for the legally sanctioned and publicly-funded killing of more than one hundred thousand babies each year in this country, and they care nothing about it now, having permitted assisted suicide.
Why is it that when liberal-minded totalitarians throw their weight around, people die?
Bob Cooper
Elora
Bob cooper