MPs can be a pretty timid bunch. Ask them to weigh in on a particularly difficult issue, and you'll find all manner of prevarication and an unwillingness to deal with it. Drag it out long enough and eventually the courts will have to get involved, at great expense, and in the end, the government will be dragged toward making changes, kicking and screaming along the way, but secretly happy that they don't have to wear the decision.
We've seen this film a number of times, with gay and lesbian rights in Alberta, or same-sex marriage federally, and now with medical assistance in dying. We're seeing this play out yet again with Bill C-14, even after the Supreme Court of Canada has rendered their verdict. While they were under no obligation to give parliament time to come up with a new legislative regime to offer said assistance striking down the relevant Criminal Code sections and replacing them with the test that they laid out in their decision in Carter would not have opened any floodgates and would have provided those suffering right now the relief that they have long been seeking, but cognisant of their place, they instead instructed parliament to draft a new law that would take their judgment and put it into statute. And yes, they gave them a deadline, because otherwise MPs, timid as they are, would sit on this and debate it endlessly while people continue to suffer.
The previous government, perhaps sensitive to the social conservatives in their own caucus and the need to keep that particular voter base satiated in advance of the election, chose to sit on the decision for six months before putting together a three-person panel to study the issue, with two of its members being the very people who advocated against such a law before the courts. That left it up to the new government to deal with the issue with almost no time left on the clock. They asked the Court for six more months, and the Court, looking at the parliamentary calendar, gave them four it's not like parliament was going to sit into the summer to deal with it.
Consultations continued, and in a joint committee of both the Commons and the Senate, a progressive list of suggestions were put forward. The government chose to ignore most of them and tabled a pretty small-c conservative bill that most people argue doesn't meet the test that the Supreme Court put forward.
And then the delays started.
Some MPs demanded that the bill be immediately referred to the Supreme Court to see if it passed muster because apparently MPs are looking to make their role irrelevant in the future, subordinating the legislative branch to the judicial. After all, why take any kind of moral stand if you can hide behind yet another court ruling?
Second Reading debate got underway. The government offered to sit until midnight to give every MP a chance to speak if they so wished, and they had two late nights. The second night, the government offered to let the debate go all night. The opposition declined, and by this point, had started to put up the same MPs for a second round. And let's face it most of these speeches were the same thing. "This is a very personal issue," the MP would say mournfully. And then "What about palliative care? We should be doing more palliative care before we start considering assisted suicide." And then there were the "conscious rights" objectors, who felt that doctors shouldn't have to refer patients to someone who would be willing to provide the assistance if they objected to it themselves. The language in the bill ensured that no doctor would be forced to perform the procedure, but that was not enough for these MPs. But by the time you had 84 MPs giving virtually identical speeches at the stage of the bill dedicated to the agreeing with the broad strokes, it's hard to see why this needed to carry on endlessly.
The government decided that the duplication of speakers was a sign that debate was collapsing and opted for time allocation heavy-handed since apparently debate was to collapse that very night, but their use of procedural tactics seemed to indicate that they were trying to head off other dilatory motions that might have been headed their way.
The bill is now at committee, with over a hundred amendments on the table to consider. Some of them border on ridiculous things like demands that there be provisions for funding for palliative care, never mind that it's a bill that makes technical amendments to the Criminal Code and a couple of other statutes that required definitions to change as a result, and never mind that delivery of healthcare is a provincial responsibility thus federal legislation has no business governing it. Others, like conscious rights issues, are best left to the provincial regulating bodies of physicians, but nevertheless they demand it be in the bill.
No doubt we are going to see the heavy procedural hand of the government drop again as this bill heads to its conclusion, if only because MPs would rather delay and talk out the clock rather than make a decision on a tough issue. It's part of their nature. We may also see the Senate needing to be the grown-ups in this conversation, and pushing the government itself to amending the bill to closer reflect the Supreme Court decision, deadline be damned, and they would be well within their rights to do so after all, it's their job to ensure that bills respect the constitution, and it's not clear that this bill does given the Carter decision.
But so long as MPs continue to demonstrate a lack of spine and fortitude to make tough decisions, we will likely need to see a firm hand needed to get the bill passed, in one shape or another.
