A Time and Manner to Die: a Study of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the heart of one’s decision to seek medical assistance in dying lie a person’s autonomy and bodily integrity. In Carter v Canada (Attorney General), the Supreme Court of Canada applied this reasoning to hold that every adult person, who has a grievous and irremediable medical condition and is enduring intolerable suffering has the right to a physician-assisted death. I argue in this paper that if a life is no longer worth living due to the very high price to pay to live it, then a person should be permitted to “waive” his/her right to life. In my view, just bearing the grievous and irremediable medical condition that has the effect of causing enduring intolerable suffering to an individual constitutes a very high price to pay. Expecting that individual to have a reasonably foreseeable natural death as well is an affront to that person’s autonomy, bodily integrity and human dignity. I contend that this is the effect of Bill C-14, Parliament’s response to Carter, and Quebec’s Act Respecting End-of-Life Care. Both laws require a patient to prove the elements of a grievous and irremediable medical condition, as the condition is defined in each respective legislation, but in addition, this patient must prove that his/her natural death is reasonably foreseeable and, in Quebec, that he/she is at the end of life. I argue that both laws contravene the essence of Carter and the Canadian constitution on both grounds of federalism and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Charter). As the notion of dialogue or Charter dialogue often surfaces to describe the relationship between the courts and a competent legislative body, this paper invokes this notion as the basis for its theoretical framework. This paper adopts a normative perspective in anticipation that the SCC will take another look at the issue of medical assistance in dying. It argues what Parliament should have done, or, perhaps, more accurately, what it should not have done in response to Carter. I raise similar arguments in the case of the Quebec legislation. In my opinion, the two laws could successfully be challenged in court.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".