Canadian parliament passes assisted suicide bill

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm with Santander on this one. I'm deeply concerned and unhappy about this. I'd be even more concerned and unhappy if this included acceptance of the Groningen Protocol, which provides a legal framework for implicating parents in the deaths of their children.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Is this really a priority right now? Trudeau should focus on a lot of other issues before getting to this.

Repealing half the laws passed between January 2006 and October 2015 would be a nice place to start.

Also, Yukon and the Northwest Territories should merge, that should have been done as soon as Nunavut was created.

Also they need to resolve that oil pipeline being built towards the northern British Columbia coast. I can't decide which is more important, the Canadian Oil that would flow from there, further impoverishing Saudi Arabia, or protecting one of the most beautiful regions in North America from environment-destroying oil companies. Decisions, decisions.

But, but it's 2016!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Also, I'm not sure what 'muh morals' is supposed to indicate here, other than 'a shorthand for any or all of the various reasons one might have qualms about assisted suicide'.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I know this is, like, my solution to everything, but I'd have a lot of sympathy for some sort of affirmative defense of...maybe not necessity, necessarily, but something similar in malpractice or wrongful death suits in which a doctor has agreed to help somebody who's suffering without hope end their life. I'd still have personal qualms about that situation but would probably be comfortable jerry-rigging some sort of ad hoc way of accepting that these things happen and I wouldn't think it would (necessarily) set or further sociologically, legally, or morally unacceptable precedents. What I'm more roundly opposed to is institutionalizing those situations as a 'normal' part of medical practice, partly since I'm--and I recognize you may find this deeply weird or even repugnant--taking a rather 'doctor-side' approach to this issue. I'm not invested in this to enforce some sort of ironclad rule that one mustn't ever decide to die. (For one thing, I think the boundary between suicide and martyrdom is too subjective and porous for me to sincerely commit to that. Also, my current username is a Kurt Vonnegut reference; I'm familiar with the admirable and morally serious body of thought and literature surrounding these issues beyond the 'muh morals'/'muh autonomy' dichotomy--which I think, or want to think, can be shown to be a false dichotomy much of the time.)

Of course my preferred solution only works in common law countries and I'm not sure how to resolve that. In the case of Canada I'm not sure how it would apply or fail to apply to Quebec.

I'm taking a bioethics class in the fall and would love to revisit this issue (and abortion tbh) once I have. I'm open to having my ideas on appropriate legal and professional standards change, although I doubt my personally preferred forms of moral grandstanding will; elements of the way the culture of chronic and end-of-life care often changes in countries that legalize assisted suicide personally scare me as a disabled person too much for that.