Among the facts that the government suggests are no longer true are the top court's findings that:
- A permissive approach to assisted dying would not put Canada on a "slippery slope" in which disabled and other vulnerable Canadians are pressured to end their lives.
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The Canadian Bar Association is urging the federal government to expand its restrictive new law on assisted dying, allowing mature minors, people suffering strictly from psychological illnesses and those diagnosed with competence-eroding conditions like dementia to get medical help to end their suffering.
But even as the country's lawyers seek to extend the right to medical assistance in dying, the government is digging in its heels, maintaining that the facts on which the Supreme Court decided to strike down the ban on assisted dying are no longer applicable.
In a response to a court challenge of the new law, the government argues that the top court's findings of fact in the landmark Carter case last year applied only in the context of the absolute ban on physician-assisted dying that existed at the time.
Now that there is a new law — which allows assisted dying only for incurably ill adults who are already close to a natural death — the government says those findings are no longer necessarily true.
"The defendant does not admit that these findings remain true today or that they are applicable in the present case," the government argues in a document filed in the Supreme Court of British Columbia.
Among the facts that the government suggests are no longer true are the top court's findings that:
- Denying assistance in dying for people with grievous and irremediable medical conditions may condemn them to a life of severe and intolerable suffering.
- Such a person faces a "cruel choice": take his or her own life prematurely or suffer until natural death.
- A permissive approach to assisted dying would not put Canada on a "slippery slope" in which disabled and other vulnerable Canadians are pressured to end their lives.
To read the rest of the article, click here.