Kay Carter was a retired teacher, an avid traveller, a mother of seven. She lived in a BC retirement home when she was diagnosed with a painful, progressive neurological condition, spinal stenosis. In 2010, unable to access medical assistance in dying in Canada, the 89-year-old travelled to Switzerland to obtain the care denied to her here.
Gloria Taylor was a devout Christian and a lover of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. A mother and grandmother, she was working at a residential care facility for people with developmental disabilities in the Okanagan when she was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS.
Taylor too wanted to die on her own terms. So, along with the Carter family, she lent her name to a case brought by the BC Civil Liberties Association, a constitutional challenge of the law against MAID. They won at BC’s Supreme Court and at its Court of Appeal. Taylor died before the case went to the Supreme Court of Canada. But in 2015, in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), that court found criminalizing MAID unjustifiably infringed section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The law, said the Court, was of no force and effect if it prohibited a physician-assisted death for a competent adult who clearly consented to the procedure and had a grievous and irremediable medical condition, including an illness, disease or disability that causes enduring and intolerable suffering.
In response Justin Trudeau’s government passed a law allowing MAID in cases where a person’s death was reasonably foreseeable. But that law was immediately challenged in the courts, because it didn’t deal with people dying by inches, with intolerable, irremediable suffering. Finally, in 2021, Ottawa passed Bill C-7, which extended access to MAID to all people encompassed by the Carter ruling.
The Senate debate on C-7 was deep, profound and moving, as we worked through the thorny legal and ethical issues. Medical assistance in dying was one of the most thoroughly and thoughtfully debated public policy decisions in history—and one widely supported by Canadians and Albertans.
So what to make of Danielle Smith’s decision to ban MAID for people precisely like Kay Carter and Gloria Taylor?
Alberta’s Bill 18, the Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act, purports to protect vulnerable Albertans. In fact, it flies in the face of the Supreme Court ruling and of federal law. It denies Albertans with intolerable, irremediable medical suffering their Charter right to MAID. People who want to die with dignity, people who want one final chance to exercise agency after so much agency has been taken from them.
The new law also infringes mightily on the rights of those whose deaths are imminent.
Bill 18 forbids doctors to refer suffering patients to another province for a MAID assessment. It forbids health facilities from displaying information on MAID in a poster or pamphlet. It forbids Alberta doctors and nurses from even discussing MAID with a patient, unless the patient initiates the conversation.
All of this may be wide open to legal challenge. But of course, all Smith’s government need do is invoke the notwithstanding clause to get around that pesky Charter.
Most Albertans support MAID for people with irremediable medical suffering.
Criminal law remains a federal domain. Alberta can’t jail physicians if they violate these new laws. Healthcare, though, is provincial jurisdiction. So Bill 18 threatens people who practise MAID, or even provide information about it, with discipline by their professional colleges—and could ultimately cost them their licences. Indeed, it undermines the autonomy of the College of Physicians and Surgeons by making such sanctions mandatory.
It’s a legal loophole. A moral outrage. And a perplexing political strategy.
An Environics poll from this January found 79 per cent of Albertans agree with the Carter decision and support MAID for people with irremediable medical suffering. We are also much more likely to opt for MAID in cases of irremediable suffering than are most other Canadians. In 2024 Quebec had the highest rate of residents who opted for MAID for conditions that weren’t immediately terminal. Alberta was a close second. That’s perfectly consistent with a culture that puts a high premium on personal liberty, independence and self-determination.
Smith has tried to distract us, by claiming to be protecting children and people without mental capacity from euthanasia, and stopping people from making advance directives for MAID. But those things aren’t currently allowed by federal law. Indeed, much of Bill 18 bans things that aren’t actually happening.
Forget the UCP fearmongering. Alberta is doing an end run around the Constitution, depriving the most vulnerable of their Charter rights and denying health professionals the ability to do their jobs responsibly. Like it or not, Alberta is still a part of Canada. This legislation, though, makes Albertans second-class Canadians. It robs us all of the freedom to make fundamental choices about how we live—and how we die.
Paula Simons is an independent Alberta senator and member of the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs.
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Read More: Should We Expand Eligibility for MAID?
