The newest supreme court justice named by Canada’s ultra-liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was the first Canadian judge to rule that a person could legally be assisted to commit suicide.
Sixty-year-old Sheila Martin, who was announced by Trudeau in late November as the latest addition to Canada’s high court, will take her place at the court when Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin retires on December 15. Martin was serving on Alberta’s Court of Queen’s Bench in February 2016 when she ruled that a Calgary woman suffering from ALS could end her life. The unnamed woman was the first person outside of Quebec to be allowed legally to end her life with help from a physician.
CBC News reported that Quebec had earlier passed its own assisted-suicide measure, which went into effect in December 2015. A Quebec City woman who died with the assistance of her doctor became Canada’s first assisted suicide victim in January 2016. Since then there have been at least 20 other assisted suicides in Quebec, and Martin’s ruling appeared to pave the way for such killings to be facilitated in other provinces as well.
LifeSiteNews.com noted that Martin highlighted the assisted-suicide decision “in her application to the top court because it ‘shows how judges are often required to confront the pressing issues of our time,’ she wrote.”
Martin explained that the woman at the center of the case appealed to the court on a Thursday, “and sought permission to end her life on the following Monday. Time was of the essence, her decision was personal, permanent and profound, and I was called upon to respond fully and quickly” — which she did, with no apparent internal check about the morality of her ruling.
Martin’s appointment is part of Trudeau’s effort to stack Canada’s judiciary with ultra-liberal judges. The Washington Post noted that with Trudeau, “a self-proclaimed feminist … [a] focus on gender and racial diversity has continued in appointments to Canadian government agencies and to the courts for which his government has responsibility, including federal courts and senior courts in the provinces. According to the latest statistics, the Trudeau government has appointed 74 new judges over the past year, of whom 37 or half, are women.”
LifeSiteNews reported that the appointment of Martin raises an alarm over the increase of “radical feminist activism” in the courts. The pro-life news site noted that Martin “penned a thesis on ‘Legal Controls on Human Reproductions in Canada: A History of Gender Biased Laws and The Promise of the Charter’ for her law doctorate at the University of Toronto in 1991…. She also argued ‘numerous cases’ before the Supreme Court of Canada for the Legal Education and Action Fund, or LEAF, the feminist movement’s pro-abortion legal arm.”
