Wesley Smith: Canada Senate Votes for More Euthanasia.

This article was published by Wesley Smith on June 10, 2016.

Wesley Smith

By Wesley Smith

Assisted suicide advocates in this country pretend it is about terminal illness as a political expedience. It’s baloney, but a lot of people fall for it. Ya gotta want to believe! 

The need for euthanasia advocates’ deploying this tactic was obliterated in Canada when the Supreme Court conjured a right to be lethally injected if one has a medically diagnosed illness causing irremediable suffering–as defined by the patient. That goes waaay beyond a terminal illness, perhaps to the mentally ill (as allowed in Belgium and the Netherlands) 

Now, euthanasia advocates, freed from having to persuade the public, are have revealed their true goals, pushing for the most radical and broad license to be killed in the world. 

The House of Commons passed enabling legislation that mildly reined-in the agenda, requiring death to be “reasonably foreseeable.” That’s a mere pretense of limitation–more a gesture than a policy–which isn’t the diagnosis of an actual terminal condition, just one that could become terminal…someday. 

Too restrictive! The Canadian Senate just removed the “foreseeable” requirement. From the National Post story: 

The Senate voted Wednesday to allow suffering Canadians who are not near death to seek medical help to end their lives, knocking out the central pillar underpinning the federal government’s proposed new law on medically assisted dying. 

Senators voted 41-30 to amend Bill C-14, deleting the requirement that a person’s natural death must be “reasonably foreseeable.” 

The amendment replaces the eligibility criteria in the bill with the much more permissive criteria set out in last year’s landmark Supreme Court ruling, which struck down the ban on assisted dying. 

The Senate is indeed more in line with the Supreme Court’s ruling. 

But the Canadian Charter could have allowed the Parliament to temporarily void the ruling or make it nonbinding through a process know as the “notwithstanding clause.” (Would that the US had such an ability.) It didn’t even try. 

It it is beyond disturbing how enthusiastically–indeed, like being swamped by a dam bursting–Canada has being swept up into the culture of death. 

As our closest neighbor, both in proximity and culture, we will not be unaffected.