OTTAWA -- The Canadian Bar Association is urging the federal government to expand its 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heels, maintaining that the findings on which the Supreme Court decided to strike down the ban on assisted dying are no longer applicable.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, filed by the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, the government argues that the top court's findings 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 the seriously ill who are already near death, the government says it won't admit the findings in Carter remain true or are applicable today.
Among the findings that the government suggests are no longer applicable are the top court's conclusion that a grievously ill person who can't get medical help to die faces a cruel choice: take his or her own life prematurely or endure intolerable suffering until natural death.
Grace Pastine, litigation director for the BCCLA, says the federal government is effectively attempting to re-try the Carter case.
