Send an urgent message to Canadian legislators urging them to stop expanding assisted suicide
(LifeSiteNews) — A 2021 law could see Canadians punished for impeding someone’s ability to access “medical” procedures including euthanasia, abortion and gender “transitions,” a lawyer has warned LifeSiteNews.
In an exclusive interview, Lion Advocacy lawyer Daniel Ari Freiheit warned LifeSiteNews that Bill C-3, introduced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government and enshrined into law in 2021, could theoretically see Canadians imprisoned for up to ten years if they were to cause “fear” in someone by impeding them from obtaining controversial “medical” procedures including euthanasia, abortion, gender “transition” procedures, and even the COVID-19 vaccine.
“In Canada, if you interfere or impede someone from accessing Medical Assistance in Dying, or cause them ‘fear,’ you could be arrested and put in jail for up to 10 years,” Freiheit wrote on X, formerly Twitter, late last month.
In Canada, if you interfere or impede someone from accessing Medical Assistance in Dying, or cause them “fear”, you could be arrested and put in jail for up to 10 years.
That’s right folks: Jail for trying to save a life.
You can’t make this stuff up.https://t.co/PQxbslsVUO pic.twitter.com/GFeuEbozq3— Lion Advocacy (@LionAdvocacy) January 30, 2024
In his post, Freiheit referenced the text of Bill C-3, which states that it is illegal for Canadians to engage in “any conduct with the intent to provoke a state of fear” in a person seeking to receive any medical treatment or procedure.
According to the wording of the bill, the law applies to all “health services,” which Freiheit explained to LifeSiteNews includes “abortion, gender reassignment surgery, transitioning (hormone therapy), COVID and other vaccines.”
In speaking to LifeSiteNews, Freiheit stated that the law seems to be aimed at preventing a person from physically blocking another person from receiving a medical procedure, but that the wording of the law could be interpreted more broadly to include prohibiting a person from just verbally advising another person against undergoing a certain treatment or procedure.
“It looks like the overall purpose of the provision is to prevent people from physically impeding or harassing others, especially at the site of specific health service locations, from getting the health services they need (or want),” Freiheit explained. “I don’t think counseling someone not to take a medical service would be illegal if the intent of the counsellor was not make the other person needlessly fearful, but rather to provide the costs and benefits of a specific health service.”
“Reporting on the dangers of a particular drug would ideally be done carefully and judiciously, with proper authority for any information being disclosed,” Freiheit continued.
However, Freiheit noted that he could see a situation in which the law has the potential to be used against a person just for verbally dissuading someone from undergoing a medical procedure, even if such a situation seems unlikely.
“If a parent yells at their kid 20 times that the COVID-19 vaccine will kill them, will make them infertile – without any equivocation, or studies being relied upon to justify the claim, or dissenting views – I can see a situation where the child (if they feel victimized) or another guardian associated with the child, uses that ‘fear inducing’ medical tirade by the parent and reports it under the new law,” he said.
Freiheit said that “The rationale for the law is honorable: it’s to allow people to freely make their own medical decisions, without being harassed or intimidated by members of the public.” But that doesn’t mean the wording of the law is unobjectionable or free from potential weaponization.
“The problem with this particular wording, and with the Crown’s prosecutorial strategy generally, is that the process itself can we weaponized to intimidate and confuse members of the public as to what rights they still retain under the Charter, international law, etc,” Freiheit explained to LifeSiteNews. “At the end of the day any law can be weaponized by those wielding power. The question is, do we really want to weaponize our legal system like this?”
Freiheit explained that the new law could be considered an infringement on freedom of speech depending on “what limitations on speech are reasonably justified in a free and democratic society.”
Freiheit explained that in the past, this may have been less of an issue, but that “[a]fter COVID, I no longer know what this means.”
“As part of any new legislation, the government is required to address whether due consideration has been given to this balancing act [the balancing of the enforcement of the new law and the rights afforded to Canadians under the Charter], and they have to publish their reasoning on why the limitation is a justified violation of the Charter (or how the law avoids violating the Charter),” Freiheit explained.
“A Court is not bound by the Government’s reasoning and is free to override the Government’s published claim,” he continued, sharing that he is of the view that “rather than criminalizing speech and threatening to incarcerate members of the public for inducing ‘fear’ in others, we need a better set of tools to empower recipients of the ‘threatening’ or ‘fear-inducing’ speech to defend themselves.”
Bill C-3 is not the first Trudeau government law to come under scrutiny for its potentially broad-scope.
Similar warnings were given about Bill C-4, the Trudeau government’s 2021 ban on “conversion therapy.”
Going beyond the normal definition of “conversion therapy,” the Trudeau government broadened the definition to include “any practice, treatment or service designed to: change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual; change a person’s gender identity to cisgender; change a person’s gender expression so that it conforms to the sex assigned to the person at birth; repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behavior; repress a person’s non-cisgender gender identity; or repress or reduce a person’s gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth.”
Under Bill C-4, the above remains illegal even if the person seeking help is an adult who is doing so voluntarily, which led many Christian groups to warn that standard religious doctrine regarding sexuality has been effectively made illegal by the bill.
Send an urgent message to Canadian legislators urging them to stop expanding assisted suicide