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Prof. Moira McQueen, executive director of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute

TORONTO, September 10, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – If anyone should know where to draw the ethical line in the sand it is an ethicist, and Moira McQueen, executive director of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute and professor of moral theology at St. Michael’s College in Toronto, did not disappoint.

Selected by the Ontario government for an interprovincial panel to advise on safeguards for the upcoming legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia, McQueen turned the job down flat, though some might say she could have provided a Catholic counterweight to some ardent euthanasia activists also picked for the panel.

“When something is really seriously wrong in the first place — Catholic teaching would call it intrinsically wrong — how can you mitigate the harm?” she told the Canadian Catholic News service. “It’s so wrong, no matter what follows from it is also wrong. I would call it formal co-operation.”

“Formal co-operation with evil is something that, in Catholic moral teaching, one can never do,” McQueen told LifeSiteNews. “It is when one is directly involved.”

That was clearly the case with the expert panel. “Look at its terms of reference. It is to advise on the implementation of euthanasia.”

McQueen emailed the Ontario attorney general to refuse, explaining that the only contribution she could in good conscience make to the panel was to “express my moral objections.”

McQueen dismissed the idea she could help make the best of a bad situation on the panel by working for stringent safeguards. “I’ve been saying and we’ve been seeing for 10 years that safeguards don’t work. They are put in place and over time they evaporate. We saw the same thing in this country with abortion.”

When abortion was legalized, before the law was later thrown out by the Supreme Court in 1988, it was supposed to be only when a woman’s life was threatened. “But that turned into abortion on demand,” said McQueen. “The same will happen with assisted suicide. Once the floodgates were opened, anything goes. I don’t see it being any different with this.”

McQueen said the existence of the panel and the “safeguards” it promises to establish will just lull Canadians “into a false sense of security about mitigating harm.” They will “sit back and say that’s acceptable.” As in other countries, there will be critics in Canada warning that the safeguards are being ignored. Unfortunately, Canadians “are not informed enough and will not be listening.”

Better, McQueen said, that the Canadian government simply defy the Supreme Court using Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the so-called “notwithstanding clause.” This allows the Canadian Parliament or any provincial legislature to override a part of the Charter, such as the provisions used by the Supreme Court to throw out the Criminal Code prohibition on assisted suicide.

Such an override expires after five years, but is renewable. It allows lawmakers to override the judiciary at the risk of offending the voters. The Quebec legislature applied Section 33 to all its legislation for the first five years after the Charter was enacted in 1982.

The expert advisory group spurned by McQueen has also come under fire from the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition. The EPC’s legal counsel Hugh Scher said the interprovincial panel’s very existence was premature. He argued that it should wait until a federal commission also just created has done its job examining the legal issues around assisted suicide and euthanasia.

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Both bodies were created because last February the Supreme Court of Canada threw out parts of the Criminal Code prohibiting assisted suicide in some circumstances.  But the court delayed its decision’s coming into force for a year to allow governments time to set safeguards in place.

Scher also expressed concern that the provincial governments seemed intent on creating an expert panel polarized between opponents of euthanasia such as McQueen and another Catholic theologian, Sister Nuala Kenny, and euthanasia promoters such as law professor Jocelyn Downie, bioethicist Arthur Schafer, and journalist Maureen Taylor.

Sister Nuala, a professor emeritus of bio-ethics at Dalhousie University, says she will join the expert panel. She is widely known for her book, Healing the Church, a response to clergy sexual abuse.

Sister Nuala rejects McQueen’s reasoning. “We have lost the battle for those of us who believe assisted death is wrong,” she said. But if Canada’s provincial and federal governments have no guidelines in place by the time the Supreme Court’s decision comes into effect on February 6, 2016, “We would have in this country the most liberal assisted-dying policies in the world.”

But for Prof. McQueen, “I can’t really take a pragmatic approach. It’s a matter of principle.”

In other countries the guidelines initially restricting euthanasia to willing participants and assisted suicide to the terminally ill have been ignored by many doctors, who euthanize comatose patients without their consent, and agree to help people kill themselves simply because they are depressed at the loss of a loved one or at the failure of sex-change surgery to live up to expectations.

Disabled rights groups such as Not Dead Yet have also expressed concern that legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia will lead the health system to encourage disabled people to end their lives rather than require costly care at the public’s expense.