Conservative government tries to con Canadians on Assisted Dying

Canada's Supreme Court found unanimously that the criminalisation of assisted dying violates our Charter rights. Mr Harper's government was hell-bent on persuading the Court that assisted dying would pose a serious threat to vulnerable people, and whatnot else. The Crown's expert witnesses were sufficiently weak in the evidence that they presented that not a single judge on the Supreme Court (the majority of whom were appointed by Mr Harper) sided with the government.

Mr Harper, ever so keen on pleasing his party's religious fundamentalist voter base, has now appointed a panel of three to manage a consultative process with Canadians and to recommend to the federal government how it should regulate assisted dying. Mr Harper's government has a long-standing tradition of ignoring Supreme Court judgments or of trying to subvert them. I'm afraid, the same will happen with the Court's assisted dying ruling. Mr Harper will fail on this occasion, too.

Two of the three folks on the panel are anti-euthanasia activists. They duly told us that their personal views would not affect their recommendations. That is pretty funny.

For at least one of them, the panel's current Chair, Dr Harvey Chochinov, we know that this reassurance is worth little. I have written about his activities in the past.

Dr Chochinov was (as his fellow panelist and fellow anti-choice activist Catherine Frazee) an expert witness the Crown attorneys wheeled in to bolster their anti-choice case in the Supreme Court. His analysis and expertise sank pretty much without a trace. To give you an indication to what extent Dr Chochinov's personal views on the subject influence even his expert opinion in a Canadian court, consider the following:

A little-known Canadian on-line journal called Current Oncology published – curiously timed for the BC Supreme Court proceedings - a piece by Jose Pereira an Ottawa based anti-euthanasia campaigner. The on-line journal ran the article at the time as a regular article, implying that it underwent anonymous peer review. It eventually relegated it to an opinion piece status after it became clear how error-ridden it actually was.  Jocelyn Downie and colleagues undertook a line-by-line analysis of said article, since also published in said on-line outfit. It turned out to be the case that many of Pereira’s claims were not only not backed by the references he chose to insert, but that literature he cited actually reached conclusions different to those he reported. Dr Chochinov, chair of Mr Harper's anti-choice panel, didn’t hesitate to call the discredited piece by Pereira an ‘excellent article’ in his expert report. (Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), 2012 BCSC 886 (Expert Report, Dr. Harvey Chochinov at pp 16-17).

You tell me, is that an indication of a professional capable of rising above the fray and not letting his personal views influence his professional work? I think not. 

So, when his fellow anti-euthanasia activist, Dr Frazee, assures a skeptical public that she and her fellow panelists would not let their personal views on assisted dying interfere with the panel's work, pardon me for not believing a word of what she is saying. Her panel chairman has gone so far as to praise in Court, as an expert witness for the Crown, a piece of research that served his ideological convictions, even though it was patently obvious that said piece of research was nothing much other than an agitprop exercise by a fellow anti-choice activist.

The good news for us Canadians is that it won't matter what this panel reports. By the time it reports, the government that appointed it won't be anymore. Even if, courtesy of NDP/Lib vote splitting, it sneaks back in, the Supreme Court will eventually ensure that our constitutional rights are protected, no matter what Dr Chochinov and colleagues report back to government.

It is troublesome that Dr Chochinov and his fellow-panelists saw it fit to accept Mr Harper's invitation, given the obvious election campaign related nature of their appointment. But then, Dr Chochinov has a less than stellar record when it comes to ethical judgment. So, perhaps he is the right man for Mr Harper's job after all...

Abortion wars in Canada

Here's is this last week's column from the Kingston Whig-Standard.

One of the reasons for Stephen Harper’s past electoral successes had undoubtedly to do with his promise not to touch the abortion or the marriage equality issues while in office. Canadians are not keen on reopening, in particular, the divisive abortion controversy. Realizing that any other course of action would be politically suicidal, Harper has slapped down backbenchers of his own caucus who tried to do otherwise. One has to give credit to the man where credit is due, whether because of political expediency or because he takes promises seriously, the prime minister stuck to his guns on the abortion issue.

Let me say at the outset that I support the status quo on abortion in the country. It’s up to pregnant women to decide whether they have an abortion or whether they carry a pregnancy to term. There are good moral reasons to do with what I take to be the moral status of embryos and fetuses and what I take to be the moral foundations of what is a woman’s absolute right to control what is happening to her body. This is well-trodded ground, though. These arguments have been going back and forth between pro-choicers and anti-choicers at least since the late 1960s. I am not going to bore you with a rehash of these arguments. Those who disagree will continue to disagree. If you believe that an embryo is a person from the moment of conception, nothing that I can say with regard to the science and morals of what dispositional capacities should be required to call something a person will likely sway you toward my take on the issue.

I am more concerned about patterns of what I take to be strategically motivated campaigning by anti-choice groups. I first noticed it in the context of the euthanasia debates. Anti-choice activists, typically closely aligned with conservative religious organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church, have started repackaging their campaign messaging. In the good old days, they’d have simply told us that their God doesn’t like euthanasia and then they would have expected the rest of us to fall in line. That, of course, doesn’t quite cut it any longer today. So they have started resorting to quite vacuous rhetoric such as that euthanasia violates “human dignity.” When you ask what exactly they’re talking about here, Christian ideology comes to the fore in no time. It’s really just an attempt to sell religious views in secular verbiage. Or they claim that “vulnerable” people would be at gravest risk of abuse. A closer look at the social class makeup and educational background of the vast majority who ask for assistance in dying shows that there’s nothing to this scare campaign, either. Call me a cynic, but I am not just a little bit suspicious that this rhetoric is truly mere expediency. It has probably been road tested with pilot groups and has yielded results considered desirable by these same religious campaign organizations.

I cannot help but wonder whether a similar switch has also occurred in the abortion wars. Knowing that the overwhelming majority of Canadians are perfectly comfortable with where we are at with regard to the legal status of abortion, activists have been looking for wedge issues, that is issues where even your average liberal Canadian would scratch their heads wondering whether that might not be problematic. The objective here is to build coalitions with people who would generally consider themselves pro-choice or “on the fence.” What’s needed, much like in the euthanasia debate, are sensitive issues that would make people second-guess their stance on abortion.

And so it goes. The wedge issue chosen — strangely to my mind — isn’t late-term abortion. They typically do not occur for any frivolous or no reason at all, but because of very serious fetal abnormalities that were not caught earlier during pregnancy. While that is so, late-term abortions have been a popular target for anti-choice activism in the United States and elsewhere. Their Canadian brethren have instead zoomed in on sex selection. You know, women having abortions because of the sex of the fetus. I could be mistaken, but it seems it all started with what I still consider a remarkably disingenuous editorial penned by an interim editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal about two years ago. He suggested that pregnant women should not be provided with information about the sex of their fetus in order to prevent sex-selective abortion among Indo-Canadians. In the editorial, he refers to female fetuses as “girls.” Incredibly, he even referred to “saving” millions of women in India and China, as if the abortion of female fetuses amounted to the murder of either girls or women. It tells you a lot about the Canadian Medical Association Journal that such nonsense should ever have found its way into its editorial pages. There is, in fact, some weak evidence suggesting a slight gender imbalance among newborns of Canadians of East Asian descent, if a report published in the Toronto Star newspaper can be trusted. In the big swing of things, in Canada, this truly is neither here nor there. We must ensure that women are not pressured into having abortions, but ultimately, their motives are irrelevant, for all intent and purposes. We cannot say that women have the right to choose unless we disagree with their motives.

I have had gay friends of mine — happily pro-choice otherwise — who got all agitated when I suggested that at some point down the track, if we had a prenatal test for sexual orientation, some women might choose to abort fetuses testing positive for future homosexuality. They suddenly thought there should be limits on women’s rights to choose. Hello … conservative Christian campaigners, there’s a whole new target group for your material, a new partner in arms so to speak, gays concerned about their future numbers — who would have thought.

Conservative MPs and anti-choice campaigners decided opportunistically to ride this wave, complaining about “female gendercide,” pretending that this is a human rights issue. Of course, this can only be a human rights issue if you already assume that fetuses somehow have sufficient moral standing to grant them human rights. This isn’t actually the case in Canada.

It would be nice if political campaigners were more transparent about their motives. Anti-choice activists have truly refined their campaign techniques with a view to generating empathy among the wider Canadian public. We shouldn’t fall for these tricks.

Udo Schuklenk holds the Ontario Research Chair in Bioethics and Public Policy at Queen’s University, he tweets @schuklenk.

Time to legalize cannabis use in Canada

Here's this weekend's column in the Kingston Whig-Standard.

The Harper government’s general approach to policy seems to be: ensure that it isn’t based on scientific evidence. Since our great leader’s rise to power scores of government scientists have variously been muzzled or fired. Nothing is surely worse than evidence coming in the way of implementing sacred-cow conservative policies!

I had no idea that medical cannabis was high on our dear leader’s agenda, but it turns out that it is. Let me be clear about my take on cannabis. It’s as close to a no brainer as it gets that adult access to it ought to be legal. While there are health consequences if you inhale it, they are nowhere as bad as those caused by alcohol, a drug much more likely to lead to dependency. No wonder the Editor of the top medical journal The Lancet opined, ‘cannabis per se is not a hazard to society but driving it further underground may well be.’ Unlike with alcohol, you can’t overdose on cannabis. Perhaps that’s why our government is selling alcohol directly to us, while it forces us to head to illegal dealers to access a comparably much safer drug. We have discovered recently that one of Mr. Harper’s best mates, Toronto mayor Rob Ford, tends to get so hammered from his use of alcohol that he even forgets that he’s smoking crack on the odd occasion. Trust me, there is nobody who is that severely affected from smoking a joint at the weekend.  Interestingly, Mr Ford insists that he doesn’t have a drug problem, most likely because he doesn’t conceive of alcohol as a drug. It’s here where our classification system has it all backward. Surely whether an addictive substance is a drug or not cannot be a question of its legal status. Honesty demands that we acknowledge also that the prohibition of drugs of any kind has been an utter failure.  Saying this, I’m not the odd guy out. The view that the war on drugs has been an abysmal failure is shared by 68% of Canadians, according to a 2012 representative survey. I am not a great fan of cannabis myself. I tried it once or twice – who hasn’t? – and truly I don’t know what the fuss is all about. Unlike Mr Ford I can’t get my head around inhaling smoke. I cough immediately like there is no tomorrow. From what I gather, that kind of defeats the purpose.

It turns out that there is another reason to legalize adult access to cannabis. That reason came to the fore this week. There are tens of thousands of Canadians who use medical cannabis for various ailments ranging from glaucoma to pain management to asthma – in case you want to know: for the latter it isn’t inhaled but drunk as tea. There is quite a bit of clinical evidence to support the claim by medical cannabis users that cannabis has beneficial effects. Still, cannabis isn’t actually an approved medication for most or possibly all of these and other conditions. So, here’s the bizarre system Mr Harper is foisting upon these patients. Obviously his major issue is with cannabis itself, that damn hippie drug. He can’t stand it, or, more likely, his conservative base can’t stand it. So his health minister developed a nefarious scheme to remove access to cannabis effectively from legitimate medical users.

Currently registered medical users are able to access cannabis legally, even grow it legally for their own purposes, provided they meet certain clinical conditions, and provided a doctor certifies that they meet these conditions. Yes, you heard correctly, our current system asks doctors to write quasi scripts for cannabis. That’s a bit odd, because cannabis is not actually an approved drug to treat any of the conditions currently on Health Canada’s list of approved clinical conditions. Thank our legal system for this mess. Many doctors are rightly annoyed about being dragged into this medical cannabis business at all. Some doctors tried and quickly discovered that their rooms were overrun by healthy folks who really just wanted to get legal access to cannabis. Their neighbors weren’t terribly excited about their doctors’ new ‘patients’ either. In any case, while the current system wasn’t perfect, it permitted legitimate access to bona fide medical cannabis users. Those who chose not to grow their own supply could buy it from a government facility. Within the overall unjust context of the ongoing criminalization of adult access to cannabis, this system worked, up to a point.

Mr Harper’s health minister cooked up a scheme to subvert the current status quo. Combine that with Harper’s love for private entrepreneurship and voila you get the new system, coming your way in 2014. Clearly the Harper government’s main concern was to limit medical cannabis users’ access. This is achieved by first eliminating their current ability to grow their own affordable supply in a controlled manner. Then remove the government production facility and open the field to cannabis entrepreneurs. Give licenses to these medical cannabis entrepreneurs and permit them to charge the living hell out of current medical cannabis users. Many patients have done their budgets already and discovered that their annual bills will go up from several hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. There is, of course, that minor constitutional issue of equal access. Harper has created a system whereby only the wealthiest of medical cannabis users will be able to afford continuing access, but nobody else. One company, CanniMed is currently pricing medical cannabis at between $9 and $12 per gram. Compare that to just cents per gram for homegrown cannabis. Many medical cannabis users will almost certainly resort to buying cannabis illegally on the street. No surprise the CBC’s The National managed to find a masked illegal cannabis dealer celebrating the new legislation and the financial windfall it means for his business. That’s how our federal government effectively criminalizes medical users of cannabis while permitting at the same time clever business people to make a fortune on the backs of desperate patients.  Well played Mr Harper, no doubt the victims of your legislative efforts will see you in court.

On the good news front, on federal level both the NDP as well as the Liberal Party support the decriminalization and legalization of cannabis use respectively. They are in line with the close to 60% of Canadians supportive of legal, controlled adult access to cannabis. However, don’t hold your breath hoping for government support on that front. Being out of touch with the majority of Canadians on important matters of public policy is a hallmark of this government. To be fair to Mr Harper, he doesn’t have to care. After all, he was elected to an absolute majority government on the basis of just a 39.62% share of the popular vote, courtesy of our first-past-the-post way of doing democracy. 

Udo Schuklenk holds the Ontario Research Chair in Bioethics and Public Policy, he tweets @schuklenk

Canada's Conservative government delivers to religion

Canada's conservative PM Stephen Harper finally delivers on a promise made to his conservative religious constituency. He establishes today an Office of Religious Freedoms. Thankfully it seems to be a window dressing activity, soon to be forgotten, given its measly 5 mio C$ annual budget. There ain't much it can do with that amount of money.

What's wrong with a taxpayer funded outfit designed to protect religious freedoms in other parts of the world? Nothing in principle, but... there is no good reason to privilege people's interest in holding religious views (that are fundamentally ideological views about the world) over other ideological views of the world. Why not establish an office aimed at protecting moral views of the world, conscience views or whatnot, if one sees the urgent need to protect people's (however implausible) views about how the world came about, or if one sees the need to protect their medieval takes on sexual mores or any number of other issues.

Clearly this outfit serves to realize a promise the current Canadian government made to its religious hard core of voters. While its 5 bio C$ budget suggests that even this government doesn't quite see the point of putting a lot of money into protecting people's religious freedoms in other parts of the world, it is still money that could have gone to better causes (eg the protection of people's human rights, including their right to hold ideological views of the world).

Addendum: Turns out my suspicions about this outfit were well justified. It is headed by a Catholic 'Dean' of a religious college graduating reportedly some 16 or so students. The college reportedly praises itself as an institution celebrating a model of 'education' that was in operation prior to the enlightenment age. I can't help but wonder whether Mr Harper was keen on discrediting his religious freedom operation before it even got into action. If that's what he aimed for, he certainly succeeded.

Bizarre system of democracy in Canada's constitutional monarchy

A farce - by the standards of most, if not all, liberal parliamentary democracies - has just taken place in Canada. A couple of weeks ago a minority government under the conservative PM Stephen Harper took office. The thing is, as it goes with minority governments in democracies, only a minority of Canadians actually support the government. The opposition parties consisting of the Liberals, the leftish NDP and the Quebec based nationalists have a comfortable majority in parliament over the Conservatives. So, most sensible minority government PMs would have navigated compromise courses to ensure that their government is not brought down by the parliamentary majority. Sensible politics and Stephen Harper is well and truly a contradiction in terms. So, very quickly he pissed off the parliamentary majority to such an extent that they clubbed together, signed a deal and declared that they'd oust his government.

In most liberal democracies (probably all West European ones) the president or governor general (if it's a former British colony of sorts), if there's a working majority in parliament, would task the majority coalition formally with forming government within a certain period of time. That failing there will be elections.

Now, you might think this German-Australian expat shouldn't be that judgmental about the banana republic equivalent machinations of Canadian politics. So for what it's worth, Ed Shreyer, a former governor general of Canada, had this to say on the same matter: "I'll put it this way and I will make this a plain-spoken sentence. Nothing should be done to aid and abet the evasion of submitting to the will of Parliament. I think one can stop there. It's about as basic as that."

Hey, not so in Canada. Here, bizarrely, the governor general can suspend parliament for weeks in a row for no good reason. And that exactly is what she did! Now the minority government can continue for another couple of weeks time, despite the fact that the majority of elected parliamentarians declared in writing that they (representing their electorate, ie the majority of Canadian voters) do not support the government. As if this complete disregared for democratic process wasn't enough, the governor general can also decide, after the suspension of parliament (if the recalcitrant majority still insists on electing a new government) to call a new election. Again, why bother taking the views of the democratically elected representatives of the people seriously? No need in Canada.

Poor Canadians - voting on two non-starters

It's funny living in Canada these days. The next federal elections are probably closer than those in the USA yet the gun-toting Alaskan governor and her five children are higher on the Canadian agenda than local politics. There's no big surprise in this.

The current conservative minority government is run by a mean-spirited populist politician (Stephen Harper). His main claim to fame are a failed foreign minister (he left secret documents with his that time girlfriend, a woman with reported links to a local biker gang), a health minister whose main claim to fame are attacks on a harm reduction facility in Vancouver (the facility offers drug addicts access to clean needles as a means to reduce the occurrence of infectious diseases among drug users), cuts of federal arts programs, and other populist this-n-that. While these sorts of activities undoubtedly are designed to rally his redneck base, Harper would not stand a chance in hell to get a larger share of the vote in the upcoming elections (the economy is tanking...), the Liberals have kindly come to his help.

They elected Stephane Dion, a likeable but inept academic turned politician. In the middle of a serious economic crisis in the country, sky-high energy prices just ahead of another long Canadian winter his main claim to fame is to have proposed a tax increasing environmental policy. Our environment is important, very important, the policy is comprehensive and pretty good to my mind, BUT it isn't a straightforward bread-and-butter issue for most voters, so he's on to a losing streak. Indeed, that's what all the polls are showing. Dion's Liberals have also kept the Conservatives in power by means of not voting down their legislative program in the parliament for the last year or so.

So, the Canadians are faced with a mean spirited redneck who offers some kind of leadership versus a kind spirited liberal unable to offer any kind of leadership skills. No wonder they're watching CNN to see how things pan out south of the border...