Once again, fantastic work, Meghan.

The article points to two pathologies: the Charter itself and the distorting impact of identity politics on its equality section.

I believe that the government's job is to provide a strong safety net for those who are left behind by capitalism's competitive structures, and that's a lot of people. The problem is that the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) has interpreted the rights in the Charter to only provide 'negative' rights, not 'positive' rights. Both are important. Negative rights prevent the state from encroaching on your liberty, and positive rights obligate the state to provide resources to enable you to exercise those liberties. Public education is an example of a positive right: it enables you to be a fuller, and therefore, freer, person. But the Charter provides no positive rights, so it's not quite right to say that health care is protected by the Charter. It's not. The Canadian government could repeal the Canada Health Act (the law that creates the entitlements to health care) and the Charter wouldn't stop them.

But, if the government chooses to provide a service, like health care, it must do so in a way that's consistent with the Charter's equality provision (s.15), so it can't provide health care in a way that discriminates on the basis of disability. This is where identity politics comes in. The question of whether a practice or service is iniquitous or UNJUSTIFIABLY discriminatory is a highly complex question because people are so vastly different. Some forms of discrimination are justifiable: I'm a professor and I give some but not all students extensions. If you're a mature student with two sick kids at home and your essay is late for that reason, no problem, but not because you've been partying. I'm discriminating, yes, but it's justified by objective reasons. Because identity politics eradicates the forum of objective reasoning (as whiteness) to determine what is or isn't justifiable discrimination, what we're left with is the subjective positions of my students who will, without reason, take issue with my refusal to accommodate partying as an excuse for a late essay.

So we're in a situation where it's difficult to have a reasoned conversation about whether it's justifiable discrimination to deny MAID to people with mental illness. On a personal note, I have mental illness, and I suffer horribly from it, but I don't want the MAID option because there are times when I might have used it and in retrospect, I'm glad it wasn't an option then. But I couldn't have seen what is now the present during those bleak times in the past. Depression is totalising. While you're in it, you believe it is forever. And that's what justifies denying people with mental illness medical suicide. There's also the fact that much of the suffering has social components that can be (somewhat) addressed with publicly funded supports. Publicly funded therapy, nurse practitioners specialising in mental health who can run support groups, free gyms for exercise, all of these things could alleviate much of the suffering associated with mental illness.

But MAID is cheaper, and works for the woke. Who would have thought that equality would mean killing people with mental illness because we don't want to tax the rich and use the money to support them?