The federal government has announced it will appeal a landmark B.C. Supreme Court ruling that declared Canada’s ban on doctor-assisted suicide unconstitutional and discriminatory last month.
Attorney General Rob Nicholson issued a statement Friday saying that Justice Lynn Smith’s June 15 decision would be challenged in the province’s highest court.
“The government is of the view that the Criminal Code provisions that prohibit medical professionals, or anyone else, from counselling or providing assistance in a suicide, are constitutionally valid,” Nicholson said.
“The laws surrounding euthanasia and assisted suicide exist to protect all Canadians, including those who are most vulnerable, such as people who are sick or elderly or people with disabilities.”
Nicholson said Ottawa will also seek a stay of all aspects of the decision, which Smith suspended for one year to give Parliament time to appropriately prepare for the ramifications. That puts in jeopardy a constitutional exemption that was granted to 64-year-old ALS patient Gloria Taylor allowing her the right to end her life within that year.
The attorney general said the government will not comment further while the matter is before the court.
Taylor petitioned for the ban to be changed in a suit filed by the BC Civil Liberties Association last year, and argued that she should have the right to end her life when she chooses with the help of a doctor. While she has said she isn’t ready to die yet, Lou Gehrig’s disease is slowly destroying her ability to speak and she can only eat with the help of a feeding tube.
She told reporters in November that she fears dying “an agonizing, slow, difficult, unpleasant, undignified death.”
BCCLA president Lindsay Lyster said she was “extremely disappointed” to learn that the government is filing an appeal.
“The court was clear that the existing laws violate the rights of the seriously and incurably ill. For the government to waste limited public resources to prevent Gloria Taylor and other seriously and incurably ill Canadians from accessing a physician’s help in dying is absurd,” Lyster said in a written statement.
“Beyond the hundreds of seriously ill Canadians this case gave hope to, Gloria Taylor specifically had the court’s permission to access a physician’s help so that she could die with dignity.... This level of interference by our government in the private matters between Gloria and her doctor is unacceptable.”
In her June decision, Smith wrote that physician-assisted suicide should be allowed for “grievously ill, competent, non-ambivalent, voluntary adults” like Taylor – people who fully understand the consequences of the decision to die.
The judge acknowledged the concerns of euthanasia opponents, who argue that legalizing the practice leaves elderly and disabled people open to abuse, but said the government should be able to protect the vulnerable with stringent safeguards.
Doctor-assisted suicide is already legal in several European countries and the American states of Washington, Oregon and Montana.
The B.C. decision came almost two decades after the Supreme Court of Canada rejected a similar appeal from activist Sue Rodriguez, who also suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease. She died the year after the 1993 court decision.
