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Empower U: Learn to Access Your Disability Rights Training on Canadian Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and its Optional Protocol (OP) training aims to increase awareness of how to address discrimination using more familiar Canadian human rights laws such as Human Rights Codes and the newer international Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This is training for persons with disabilities by persons with disabilities. The training is part of a project funded by Employment and Social Development Canada and implemented by the Council of Canadians with Disabilities (CCD) in collaboration with Canadian Multicultural Disability Centre Inc. (CMDCI), Citizens With Disabilities – Ontario (CWDO), Manitoba League of Persons with Disabilities (MLPD) and National Educational Association of Disabled Students (NEADS). Read more.
Canada's MPs Hear from CCD about Our Opposition to Assisted Suicide
March 18, 2013
Member of Parliament
House of Commons
Ottawa ON
KIA 0A6
Dear Sir/Madam:
The Council of Canadians with Disabilities (CCD), a national organization of men and women with disabilities, working for an accessible and inclusive Canada, applauds the Attorney General of Canada for appealing the decision in the Carter case, which struck down Canada’s prohibitions against assisted suicide. Although rarely recognized as such outside of the disability community, assisted suicide is a disability issue. Practically all people with “terminal illness” (in Oregon, six months or less to live) have disabilities. In every place where assisted suicide is supposed to be only for people who are “terminally ill”, people with disabilities who are not “terminally ill” are routinely helped to die.
Legalized assisted suicide creates a double standard. For people at the end of their life and people with disabilities there is assisted suicide and for everyone else assisted suicide is discouraged through suicide prevention measures. CCD opposes the creation of this double standard, because it reinforces disability discrimination.
People with disabilities and elderly Canadians are vulnerable to abuse. Although CCD has been studying assisted suicide since the Sue Rodriguez case in 1993, we have not found any safeguards which we believe would adequately protect people with disabilities and elderly people from the dangers of abuse. In general, the "safeguards" put forward in other jurisdictions have been ignored or abused, or otherwise stretched in application to result in the deaths of persons with disabilities not envisioned in the original legislation allowing assisted suicide.
We encourage you to support maintaining Canadian prohibitions against assisted suicide.
For more information about CCD’s perspective, please view a video about assisted suicide featuring Rhonda Wiebe, the Co-chair of CCD’s Ending of Life Ethics Committee. We have also attached a fact sheet which provides additional information on assisted suicide and euthanasia.
Sincerely,
Tony Dolan
Chairperson
Tracy Latimer
The Latimer Case
The Latimer case directly concerned the rights of persons with disabilities. Mr. Latimer's view was that a parent has the right to kill a child with a disability if that parent decides the child's quality of life no longer warrants its continuation. CCD explained to the court and to the public how that view threatens the lives of people with disabilities and is deeply offensive to fundamental constitutional values. Learn more.