On the question of euthanasia, the people have spoken. In 2010, the late Bloc MP, Francine Lalonde, made her third attempt to weaken Canada’s laws protecting the elderly and the infirm, and her bill was comfortably defeated by a vote in the House of 228 to 59. The will of the people could not be clearer. And yet, just four years after this firm rejection, the previous parliament’s decision is already being second-guessed: Steven Fletcher, the first quadriplegic MP to sit in the House, is bringing forth two private member’s bills which will take up Lalonde’s deadly crusade once more.
Advocates for the legalization of euthanasia and assisted suicide say they “welcome the coming debate.” But one doubts that their stomach for such hearty conversation would survive either bill’s passage. Indeed, one suspects that a new set of “settled issues” would spontaneously be born thereafter. And, just as suddenly, the protectors of the disabled and the dying would be portrayed by the now debate-hungry democrats as recalcitrant sore losers, unwilling to heed the people’s clear will.
It seems, then, that settled issues only ever exist on one side of social policies: until any such matter is decided in a way which suits the agenda of social liberals, “national conversations” endlessly ensue. But, no sooner have their desired changes been achieved “by whatever necessary means” than their opponents, who advocate positions held from time immemorial, turn into wilful, reactionary enemies of progress, who refuse to feel the prevailing winds of change. Steven Fletcher will certainly not be chided for re-contesting the recently reaffirmed rights of the elderly and the sick; but, if his bill becomes law, will the same kind light be cast on those that remain opposed to such radical changes?
This obvious (and odious) double standard never troubles the proponents of these positions, their apologists in the academy, or their cheerleaders in the media – and for a good reason. The assumption underpinning this asymmetry is the intuition that a democratic decision cannot actually alter the status of God-given human rights: Pierre Trudeau’s infamous Omnibus Bill C-150, for instance, did not vitiate the rights of the unborn children that it nevertheless violated.
Thus, the polls in the voting booth, for these committed social engineers, are a kind of slot machine at which their radical policies only need to win once. And yet, even after a half-century of central moral planning, abhorrent legislation like Fletcher’s is still often met with the wise repugnance of the democratic majority. Little wonder, then, that these radicals regularly collude with the courts, instead, to impose their perverse agenda on a host of issues from prostitution to same-sex “marriage” to abortion.
It never occurs to proponents of radical social policies that the people instinctively oppose these policies because the assumptions from which they spring are the product of dangerous ideological fictions. Undaunted by democratic oppositions, however, these aristocrats of enlightened ideas try their luck at the polls repeatedly until, after countless attempts, they win. And only then, when they say what these social planners have always wanted to hear, are the people deemed to have spoken.
