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Keywords

Parliamentary Studies, Canadian Law, Canadian Constitutional Law, Canadian Politics, Canada, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Assisted Suicide Physician-Assisted Suicide

Abstract

On October 19, 2015, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals won a majority of seats in the 42nd Canadian General Election. Within one week, news media were reporting that the new government would consider asking the Supreme Court of Canada to extend the amount of time it gave Parliament to pass legislation regulating physician-assisted death. Eight months earlier, the Court had ruled unanimously in Carter v. Canada that the country’s criminal prohibition on assisted suicide violated an individual’s right to life, liberty, and security of the person under Canada’s federal bill of rights, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, as a practical matter, the Court had suspended its declaration of invalidity for 12 months, giving Parliament one year to devise national regulations for medical aid in dying.

The haste with which Trudeau’s government decided to ask the Court for more time to act suggests, first, that the government felt it had to act and, second, that the government felt it needed the Court’s blessing to take more time. Neither of these assumptions was true. Instead, they represent implicit choices that tell an observer how advisors to the Trudeau government thought about the public problem it faced (physician-assisted death) and the solutions that were available to it. At the centre of that problem-solving process was the then-Minister of Justice, Jody Wilson-Raybould. Personal, institutional, cultural, and political factors influenced the Minister’s handling of the physician-assisted death file, which stifled Parliament’s ability to pass farther-reaching reform. This suggests that the task of advising is a highly dynamic, context-specific process that often requires advisors and their principals to make difficult choices among imperfect alternatives.