Assisted suicide: argument for federal legislation

Canada’s parliamentarians have been offered two distinct arguments to excuse doing nothing in the wake of the Supreme Court’s instruction to decriminalize assisted suicide within 12 months. A number of law professors and ethicists suggest (1) it’s a health concern and thus it’s provincial and (2) as a liberal society, with a liberal Charter, we can leave it to individual choice.

Canadians, along with their Supreme Court, prefer to put the individual first. So, should assisted suicide be delegated to those who are suffering and their doctors? Or do we, through Parliament, have a collective obligation to set binding national conditions on how the crime of assisted death is withdrawn?

We provide universal health care nationwide to relieve suffering, require seat belts and vaccinations, and harass smokers from coast to coast because we carry a bearable obligation to support the well-being of fellow Canadians. We interfere collectively with other people’s “security of person” when, after public consideration and democratic consent, we decide it’s for their own good.

Accordingly, we only permit our delegated professionals (MDs) to prescribe drugs when they believe the drugs may do more good than harm.

Therefore, before a doctor helps a patient end his/her life, shouldn’t that doctor, as our delegated "brother’s keeper," also have to believe — and document — that the patient would be better dead than alive?

Surely, traditional liberals and social conservatives can start their deliberations by agreeing to address this un-simple imperative.

Have fun by playing politics with the Senate

Prime Minister:

We who scurry for attention have chosen to cast your every grudging utterance as another grudging investment in your year-long re-election campaign. Accordingly, this Aide memoir is tailored to excite your dark side — a missive to a predator.

Let’s start with a little flattery.

Along with your designated threat Justin Trudeau, we note that you like the company of suburban Canadians far more than you like the company of exceptional Canadians in Ottawa. This preference, even as a long-serving prime minister, has offended active and retired Guardians of Canadian Harmony. However, not being agreeable — actually, being sarcastic — makes you more interesting and can make your detractors less lovable at the same time.

Your toss-away shrug last week about normal Canadians not pestering you to pick "their" next sixteen senators was inspired. With perfect economy, you disrespected the Senate’s new Speaker, Liberal and New Democrat premiers, constitutional experts on the timeless wisdom of Canada’s founding deal-makers, and those pundits who insist that Canada’s flawless democracy was completed, in full, a generation ago, by Justin’s father.

(Even Toronto’s rebellious National Post sided with the status quo, editorializing: Fill the Senate seats, Mr. Harper)

Being mean when playing politics is forgivable, if you’re having fun — and upsetting the other side. Canada’s laughable unelected Senate shouldn’t be your dark cloud, but theirs.

Your campaign’s humorless advisors may feel that your outburst was an irreverent distraction. You clearly know better. Simply repeating for the next eleven months “I fixed the economy, stupid” is a stupefying prospect. That will do nothing to encourage anyone to see you differently. And, besides, venturing off the economy occasionally should, in fact, raise new, lucrative questions about the center of gravity of your exotic opponent.

First, a picky caveat on message crafting:

(You don’t have to retire as a Senate reformer merely because the Supreme Court didn’t support your legislative attempt to democratize an expensive aristocratic affectation, but your next moves — below — must pay attention to the court’s decision, if not the arguments of those politicians who are hiding behind it.)

Proposal: during your visits outside of Alberta, where Senators are already elected, try playing with these statements:

*I’m short 16 representatives in the PMO Senate, where you have none. And I’m still offering my vacancies to you.

*I’d prefer that the PMO Senate was immediately turned into the People’s Senate, but I’d settle for second best. I’ll appoint automatically any qualified individual formally submitted to me by the Premier and Cabinet of your province.

*Hopefully, they’ll consult at least with their legislatures. I’ll leave it to you to judge the transparency and representativeness of whatever process they use.

*Informal, indirect Senate nominations are as far as we can go without arousing 19th-century interests in this country. However, what I’m suggesting would at least place our two feet in the 20t^h century, if not the 21st.

Despite the court’s Pollyanna regard for the architecture of the BNA Act of 1867, the court didn’t criticize or disallow Alberta’s impudent practice of consulting with Albertans directly on who they’d like to represent them in the Senate, and it didn’t instruct you to not tease, annoy, or embarrass the other provincial governments and politicians generally who don’t want to replace status quo.

Yes, all those front-row law students are right, Prime Minister, you can’t force Canadians to be aggressive democrats or change the Senate permanently without formally amending the Constitution, with the provinces. 

And, as with other controversial initiatives, future governments can reverse what you accomplish with individual premiers.

That’s the beautiful part.

Can you imagine your opponents insisting that the premiers of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, B.C., and Manitoba daren’t nominate senators? My goodness, your offer could be popular and then might temp normal Canadians to go further.  For heaven’s sake, we could — in your lifetime — end up making the Senate their institution.

Surely, you’re not afraid of Justin Trudeau’s campaign to save the PMO Senate by appointing a Blue Ribbon nominations advisory committee?

Killing Harper’s Senate reform (Part 1 anger)

I missed the street rallies, salon celebrations, and bonfire effigies of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, that slippery democrat who failed so conspicuously to democratize the Canadian Senate. I’ve caught up, however, on the small-c conservative recriminations in print and online. They should be savored quickly; the subject will soon return to the closets of Canada’s agenda-setters.

Like the seal hunt, the tar sands, and Justin Bieber, it’s truly embarrassing. Year in and year out, we agree to spend nearly $100 million to be co-governed by an unelected Senate. 

And last Friday, Canada’s Supreme Court reaffirmed unanimously that Canada’s second legislative body isn’t supposed to be democratic and that Canada’s Parliament can’t make any further legislative steps in that direction—even incrementally.

The Court declared:

“The framers (in 1867) sought to endow the Senate with independence from the electoral process to which members of the House of Commons were subject, in order to remove Senators from a partisan political arena that required unremitting consideration of short-term political objectives.”

And just in case any organic American constitutional tendencies had slipped north, John Geddes of Maclean’s Magazine shrewdly highlighted their concluding velvety handcuffs: 

“In summary, the consultative election proposals … would amend the Constitution of Canada by changing the Senate’s role within our constitutional structure from a complementary legislative body of sober second thought to a legislative body endowed with a popular mandate and democratic legitimacy.”

With all the flowery affectation of grade ten history teachers everywhere, the Court prettified a signing bonus for a 19th-century farm-team aristocracy that has, in fact, delivered little sober second thought and has never accounted to Canada’s provinces nor stayed out of the cheesiest corners of partisan politics.

The Courts extravagant literalism, however, has been widely praised for its awful clarity. They showed off their minors in political science and our establishment swooned.

Just because the Prime Minister asked its opinion, however, didn’t mean the Court was obliged to take itself so seriously and to so dangerously discourage future initiatives to make Canada’s whole Parliament more legitimate and better equipped to stand up for the federation in any future unity crisis.

For instance, they could have fretted that Harper’s option of "consultative elections" would probably lead to further pressure to enhance the Senate’s legislative powers. They didn’t have to take on their shoulders the responsibility to block that future risk by not allowing Senate elections to leak out of Alberta’s frisky democracy. Indeed, their silence on Alberta’s Senatorial Selections Act displayed either timidity and/or a lack of confidence in their ruling.

It’s ironic that Canada’s Supreme Court today would dignify the sober-second-thought rationale for an unelected Senate. That necessary constraint on popular democracy was appropriately reassigned to the Supreme Court itself, in the 1982 Constitution Act.

That liberal accomplishment — which has made Pierre Trudeau a hero in this century — was damned in the last century by most constitutional "experts" as an arrogant usurpation of the traditional constitutional prerogatives of the ten provinces. It was a glorious end-run by a PM with a handful of allies willing to break convention and answer for it later.

Is there anything that can be done in the future to democratize the Canadian Senate without a Prime Minister with Pierre Trudeau’s running room or allies?

Qualifying free speech to protect Canada’s brand?

Erna Paris has won numerous awards in the free-wheeling genre of literary non-fiction. However, she’s hardly free-wheeling about freedom of speech.

The Canadian Supreme Court is being asked again to determine whether freedom of speech can be restrained in order to restrain hateful public attacks on minorities and their beliefs. There’s no dispute that being free to express yourself doesn’t include libel, slander, and incitement to attack other individuals violently. However, a growing number of Canadians worry whether it’s possible—and proper—to limit freedom of speech in order to protect other public virtues.  

Paris isn’t squeamish about this task. She sees freedom of speech as one “public interest” that can be qualified in order to respect others. Her claim that freedom of speech should pay obedience to the “Canadian zeitgeist” of respectful, harmonious discourse would, however, transform an individual right into nothing more than another good thing in our basket of collective virtues.

Paris singles out writers Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn as “free-speech extremists.” Amazingly, she elaborates by saying “Both these authors have tried to shift the Canadian consensus by normalizing previously unacceptable levels of speech.”

This is velvet totalitarianism. The Canadian consensus in Erna Paris’s head—and conceivably in the heads of a winning majority of fellow citizens—is not in the Constitution or should not be the business of the Supreme Court.

Free speech, itself, is an extreme idea and is practiced everywhere to shift the consensus of the day. Levant and Steyn may be singleminded about insisting that Muslims suck it up and accept Mohamed doesn’t govern on this continent or prescribe the liberties of Canadian women and magazines of opinion.

Paris’ op-ed starts by making this radical assertion: “Given Canada’s multicultural fabric, it’s naïve to assume that our mythologized consensus over tolerance can’t be easily eroded by hate speech.” She concludes her op-ed piece by saying:

“It has been more than 20 years since our Supreme Court last wrestled with this issue, then upheld Canada’s hate-speech provisions by ruling (narrowly) that James Keegstra, an Alberta teacher who quizzed his students on their “knowledge” of his anti-Semitic views, was wilfully promoting hatred of a Canadian minority. The Canada we live in today is considerably more fragile than it was in 1990. Freedom of speech must be balanced with freedom from the destabilizing effects of public hatred in this, the world’s most heterogeneous society.”

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/there-are-limits-to-free-expression/article2216380/

Setting aside the arguable proposition that our society is less fragile than it was in 1990, this concern for social harmony is reactionary and ironic. One of the reasons Canada and the United States are the most popular destinations in the world for minorities and eccentric is that their governments don’t use the term “harmony” and “respect” to silence, arrest and persecute those who thumb their noses at official ideologies and gods.

Canada is multicultural because it’s a safe place to be free to be yourself. It’s crazy to suggest we need to be less free to remain a heterogeneous society.

Maybe Immigration Canada should add something like this to primers for prospective immigrants: “In Canada, you are free to practice your religion and traditions and spread your beliefs. However, you must be prepared even to be laughed at by others who think you’re ideas are wrong.”