Recommended Reading: “Assisted Dying Coming to Canada”

by | February 7, 2015

In his guest post for Canadian Atheist, Eric MacDonald says

while there are a number of very positive responses to the decision, the reader will be regaled by many who are predicting disaster when the law comes into force.

In his “initial thoughts” on the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision on assisted dying in Canada, Udo Schuklenk addresses those who opposed and continue to oppose the decision:

Opponents of assisted dying should reconsider their campaign strategies. They decided that telling anecdotes from jurisdictions that have decriminalised, making up a lot of stuff about things that allegedly happened in such jurisdictions and telling half-truths about what allegedly happened in jurisdictions that have decriminalized worked in their religious echo chamber of pro-life websites, as well as with allied newspaper columnists like the National Post’s Barbara Kay and the Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno, and so it would probably work with Supreme Court Justices, too. Turns out, Supreme Court Justices are a bit smarter than DiManno and Kay, who have shown themselves clueless about the issue at hand throughout their years of campaigning in their newspaper columns against assisted dying. The judges looked at the actual evidence and ‘rejected the argument that adoption of a regulatory regime would initiate a descent down a slippery slope into homicide.’

The other vacuous agitprop campaign tool deployed by this camp was their ever-growing concern for ‘the vulnerable’. Given that they didn’t want assisted dying available to anyone, they were careful never to define ‘vulnerable’. Turns out, they and their government ally, the Attorney General, really meant everyone. Vulnerability ceases then to be a useful threshold criterion for anything. The Attorney General eventually said, on the Court record, that ‘every person is potentially vulnerable.’ The Supreme Court called curtains on this rhetoric, too. It states point blank, ‘We do not agree.’ –

Aggressive lying and fudging of the issues apparently takes you only that far when it comes to Canada’s Supreme Court Justices.

I wonder whether one analysis in the judgment (paragraphs 64-66) could be interpreted as rejecting the Catholic acts and omissions doctrine. Check that one out yourself. Worth a read.

Schuklenk’s discussion of the Supreme Court Justices decision is, as usual, excellent. It is recommended reading.

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