The Supreme Court dismissed warnings of a slippery slope, but that is exactly what has happened
, they overturned their own precedent. In 1993, a majority of the Supreme Court found that the criminal code provisions that prohibited assisted suicide did not ultimately violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In 2015, the Court changed its mind. The law didn’t change, of course, but the court decided that “the matrix of legislative and social facts” surrounding the case had changed. Thus the interpretation of constitutional rights must change with them.
An important part of the Carter decision, where the court determined that relevant social facts had changed, was essentially a blithe dismissal of exactly what has come to pass in Canada less than a decade after the decision. The court rejected the concern that once assisted suicide was allowed in some rare cases, there would be a “slippery slope” from helping terminally ill people end their lives, to a system in which vulnerable people like the disabled were caught in a euthanizing net.
Yet just seven years after the decision, the exact scenario dismissed by the court has come to pass. Who could have seen this coming? Well, all sorts of people, and not just religious voices. Disabilities advocates in Canada have been sounding theon the path Canada was headed down since 2015, seemingly ignored by the courts and government.
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