The government followed through on their plans to invoke closure on the assisted dying bill yesterday, and with the support of the Bloc, they had final debate and a vote, which passed, sending the amended bill back to the Senate. (The NDP, incidentally, voted against it simply because they refuse to recognise the legitimacy of the Senate). Because the government only accepted a couple of the Senate amendments, and modified others, it will require another vote in the Other Place, but it is most likely that they will allow the bill to pass in time for the court-imposed deadline.

And there we have it – the modified Senate amendments to the MAiD bill have passed the Commons. Now to see if the Senate will be satisfied, or if they will insist on other amendments that the government rejected. https://t.co/lvKyvNafWY

— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) March 12, 2021

There have been a lot of disingenuous comments about this bill. Certain disability advocates have insisted that this makes it easy to kill them, which it doesn’t, and these advocates ignore that other people with disabilities have requested assisted dying and won in the courts – which is why this bill exists. Many of those advocates are trying to re-litigate the case they lost at the Supreme Court that allowed for the assisted dying regime to be created in the first place, which isn’t going to happen – that decision was unanimous and the Court is not going to revisit it. As well, one of these amendments puts a two-year time limit on the mental health exclusion so that more guidelines can be developed. That exclusion is almost certainly unconstitutional, and the government knows it – but again, there is a cadre of disingenuous commentary, including from some MPs, that this would allow anyone with depression access to assisted dying, which is unlikely in the extreme, and more to the point, it conflates other mental illnesses with depression, and it stigmatises mental illness by excluding it, effectively undoing years of trying to treat mental illness like any other illness.

I wrote about this for @CBAnatmag in November, where the legal community largely agrees that excluding mental illness is unconstitutional, and undoes years of trying to treat mental illness like any other illness. https://t.co/BZ6McV6B4U

— Dale Smith (@journo_dale) March 12, 2021

When I tweeted about this last night, I got a lot of pushback from a certain segment that coalesced around the narrative that the government would not provide supports for people with mental illness but would let them kill themselves; and furthermore, they tried to further say that the government that voted against pharamcare was doing this. There is a lot to unpack in those statements, but there are a few things to remember. One of them is that most disability supports, as well as treatment for mental health, are both in provincial jurisdiction, so the federal government can’t offer more supports for them. Hell, they can’t even simply send $2000 per month to people with disabilities – as the NDP are demanding – because they don’t exactly have a national database of people with disabilities (and they had a hard-enough time kludging together a special pandemic payment through use of the flawed disability tax credit). They do have jurisdiction over the Criminal Code, which is what this legislation covers.

As for the pharmacare bill, we’ve already covered repeatedly that it was unconstitutional and unworkable, and would not have created pharmacare, as the NDP claimed (while the government is already at work implementing the Hoskins Report). But as we’ve seen here, they sold a bill of goods to these people, and gave them false hope as to what they were doing. They lied to vulnerable Canadians to score cheap political points. The sheer immorality of that choice is utterly shameful, but this appears to be what the party has reduced itself to. I sometimes wonder how their brain trust sleeps at night.

Let us be crystal clear. This would not mean that people suffering from suicidal ideation or transient depression would be offered medical aid in dying. Nor would MAID be available to anyone who was delusional or lacked capacity to consent.

— Paula Simons (@Paulatics) March 12, 2021

It won’t be easy to get this right. But the majority of Senators recognized that an outright ban was likely unconstitutional and would likely not survive a court Charter challenge.

— Paula Simons (@Paulatics) March 12, 2021

Good reads:

• Party leaders took the opportunity to mark the one-year anniversary of the declaration of the pandemic.
• Harjit Sajjan is expected to be back before the Commons defence committee today to answer more questions on the General Vance allegations.
• The government is issuing a policy directive to the CRTC, giving it nine months to come up with a regulatory system that will see streaming service produce CanCon.
• The acting chief of defence staff gave his first speech, and he acknowledged that exclusionary military culture contributes to harassment and sexual misconduct.
• A former military police investigator spoke up about senior officers interfering in sexual assault investigations he was trying to conduct.
• Doug Ford made the classy move of attacking an Indigenous MPP for getting his vaccine to combat vaccine hesitancy in northern First Nations communities.
• Kevin Carmichael trawls the economic data to point to the need to recover from COVID in a more sustainable way rather than recreating the same weaknesses.
• Susan Delacourt notes that Canadian-style populism means that our politicians haven’t been bumped to the front of the vaccine queue, unlike in the US.
• Matt Gurney boggles at Canadians’ expectations to be at the front of the vaccine queue when we’ve underinvested in health and biomanufacturing for decades.

Odds and ends:

For the CBA’s National Magazine, I took a deep dive into Bill C-23 and the modernizations proposed therein, and found a few warning signs.

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