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Shearer’s story illustrates, all too bleakly, just how unsustainable Canada’s new physician-assisted dying rules are. We say we’re trying to balance competing human rights, the rights of the Catholic Church and the rights of patients. But there’s little balance, when a hospital’s values trump the best interests of a patient, when a dying man’s dignity is sacrificed on the altar of someone else’s religion.

Our Charter’s protection of religious freedom is sacrosanct. Catholics are entitled to their faith and to lead lives guided by their principles. Not all medical ethicists agree, but I personally believe no doctor or nurse, of whatever faith, should be compelled to participate in a physician-assisted death, if doing so would violate their conscience.

But conscientious objection has limits.

Tim Caulfield is director of the University of Alberta’s Health Law Institute.

Photo by Ed Kaiser / Edmonton Journal

“Physicians have a fiduciary duty to their patients,” he says. “Even if you recognize a right to conscientious objection, it can only be exercised in a situation where you are not prejudicing the interests of a patient.”

In this case, it’s hard imagine Shearer’s rights were ever paramount.

Yet even we respect an individual doctor’s right to refuse treatment, does one particular church have a right to run our public hospitals, which serve everyone, according to the dictates of its particular faith?

In Alberta, the Catholic right to run separate schools is enshrined in our province’s founding legislation. There’s no such constitutional protection for a separate Catholic health care system. Yet taxpayers maintain and fund Covenant Health, just such a system, with all its duplicate health bureaucracy.