[cross posted from https://cfe.ryerson.ca/blog/2017/05/our-anxious-supreme-court]

One gets the sense that the Supreme Court of Canada does not have a good feel for free speech questions. It took some time, for instance, for a majority of the Court to acknowledge that legal constraints might ‘chill’ free speech. The Court confidently proclaimed, on more than one occasion, that civil and criminal legal prohibitions should not be expected to deter speakers. 

Only recently did the Court acknowledge this possibility and, accordingly, relaxed the law of libel so as to allow a new defence of responsible communication on matters of public interest. The Court did so only after other commonwealth Courts had taken a lead in relaxing the common law of libel. It was this reform that enabled the press to report freely on the misdeeds of the late Toronto Mayor, Rob Ford, without the worry of a lawsuit.

The following co-authored editorial first appeared in the Chicago Tribune on October 18, 2016. It is a commentary on the Dutch government's proposal to introduce a new law that would enable state organized life-ending interventions for people who feel they have a 'completed life' but do not suffer from any 'untreatable medical condition' that causes 'unbearable suffering' (which are the key criteria to obtain access under the Dutch Euthanasia law). A new special 'counsellor in dying' would assess whether the request to have one's life terminated would be 'genuine' and based on a reasonable assessment of 'completed life'. 

The deluge of op-eds, blogs, commentaries, media interviews and news reports about Bill C-14 on Medical Assistance in Dying has created a level of over-saturation. More careful, reflective statements are increasingly hard to find. What now dominates the debate are bold statements about the constitutionality of the Bill—University of Ottawa’s Amir Attaran apparently even inventing a new constitutional qualifier of ‘unconstitutional by the bucketfull’--and reports of difficult and emotional end-of-life situations, which Bill C-14 may indeed not necessarily solve. It is therefore perhaps no surprise that the eloquent, respectful and wise intervention in the Senate by the Honourable Murray Sinclair, former judge and former Chair of the Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, did not receive much attention in the media.