Carter v Canada (AG)

So two years after Quebec passed its law, the federal government passed its own legislation.

That was prompted, of course, by the 2015 Supreme Court ruling Carter v. Canada, which found the right to suicide in the right to life, essentially.

And then former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau consulted with Couillard before adopting the 2016 law.

But that federal legislation, again, back to Quebec, was struck down by the Superior Court of Quebec in 2019 because it was limited to those whose deaths were reasonably foreseeable.

So for context here, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms gives the courts the power to enforce constitutional rights and indeed to basically interpret them however the current justices see fit.

As we've seen over and over again, they can reject their own previous precedents on things like euthanasia and religious liberty and then redefine jurisprudence entirely overnight.

That's how we got a Supreme Court ruling that found the right to suicide and the right to life in Carter v. Canada.

But because of concerns about judicial supremacy, Section 33 of the Charter, the Notwithstanding Clause, was inserted as a political compromise when the Constitution was patriated in 1981-1982.