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Some sort of precedent has been set here, but we do not yet know what it is. Is it that the Senate will not presume, as a general rule, to veto legislation passed by the people’s representatives — that the government of Canada will remain answerable to the popularly elected Commons and not the appointed Senate, on the principle that if a people gets the government it deserves it should at least get the government it voted for? Or is it merely that senators chose to give the Commons the benefit of the doubt this time but might not in future? Was this a white flag or a warning shot?

On the merits, the Senate was right to reject the amendment proposed by Sen. Serge Joyal, which would have suspended that section of the bill requiring that death be “reasonably foreseeable” pending a reference to the court, as it was wrong earlier to have demanded its outright removal. For all the ex cathedra pronouncements issuing from the Senate floor, no one can say with any certainty how the court might rule on the matter.

Legal scholars are divided, and the government could plausibly argue that, the court having declined to pronounce one way or the other in the Carter decision on whether the patient to be “assisted in dying” must be in some likelihood of dying unaided, the text we should consult was not Carter, but the Charter: a law need not exactly replicate the language of the former to be in compliance with the latter.

Indeed, it’s not clear it is even out of line with Carter. That may be the judgment’s short-form name, after Lee Carter, one of the appellants, but the case on which it was based was not hers, or her mother Kay’s, but that of Gloria Taylor, whose condition (ALS) was decidedly terminal. The Court is at pains to stress that the decision applies only “in the factual circumstances of this case,” referring at various points to “people like Ms. Taylor” or “persons in her situation,” i.e. near the “end of life,” as it was universally agreed was the issue before advocates started moving the goalposts.