On February 8th, United Nations experts publicly released a communiqué warning that Bill C-7 will discriminate against people with disabilities and violate human rights protected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
The experts conveyed that the bill “appears irremediably entangled in ableist assumptions about people with disabilities” elaborating that “the eligibility criteria set out in Bill C-7… may be of a discriminatory nature, or have a discriminatory impact, as by singling out the suffering associated with disability as being of a different quality and kind than any other suffering, they potentially subject persons with disabilities to discrimination on account of such disability.”
While such a pointed and collective critique at this level of international authority is a very rare occurrence, Canada has had ample warning.
Reporting on her 2019 visit to Canada, then Special Rapporteur Catalina Devandas Aguilara, wrote “The Special Rapporteur is extremely concerned about the implementation of the legislation on medical assistance in dying from a disability perspective” nothing that many people with disabilities are being offered “the ‘choice’ between a nursing home and medical assistance in dying.”
In 2020, Devandas Aguilara also released a report on the impact of ableism in science and medicine, warning that “If assisted dying is made available for all persons with a health condition or impairment, regardless of whether they are terminally ill or not, a social assumption might follow that it is better to be dead than to live with a disability” and “having an impairment should never be a reason for assisted dying to be permitted.”
The current Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, Gerard Quinn and his peers responsible for the rights of people living in extreme poverty and older persons, issued a press release early in January 2021, warning that “we all accept that it could never be a well-reasoned decision for a person belonging to any other protected group – be it a racial minority, gender or sexual minorities - to end their lives because they experience suffering on account of their status,” and affirming that “disability should never be a ground or justification to end someone’s life directly or indirectly.”
A distinguished Canadian with a disability, John Humphreys, played a leading role in drafting the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Decades later, in 2010, Canada ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and was one of the first countries in the world to do so. There are now 182 parties to this Convention, which Canadians with disabilities played a pivotal role in drafting and promoting globally. Indeed, the government of Canada’s website boasts that Canada is “recognized as a world leader for our efforts to promote and protect human rights”. Yet today, the Canadian government appears to be poised to abandon its clear commitments expressed in the Convention, and arguably, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
To press for the passage of Bill C-7, knowing what we know now and did not know in February of 2020 when this bill was first tabled, is to do harm to people with disabilities and to tarnish Canada’s proud history as a global human rights champion.
In the News
In the Literature
“Everybody, well or ill, disabled or not, imagines a boundary of suffering and loss beyond which, she or he is certain, life will no longer be worth living. I know that I do. I also know that my line, far from being scored in stone, has inched across the sands of my life: at various times, I could not possibly do without long walks on the beach or rambles through the woods; use a cane, a brace, a wheelchair; stop teaching; give up driving; let someone else put on and take off my underwear. One at a time, with the encouragement of others, I have taken each of these (highly figurative) steps… Meanwhile, I go on being, now more than ever, the woman I once thought I could never bear to be.”
