Dying with dignity

The position

The argument he made was about who decides. Not whether life is precious, which he never disputed, but whether a competent adult facing intolerable suffering is the person entitled to make the final decision about their own death. He framed it as life being the first choice but not the only choice, and he was consistent about the safeguards: a competent adult, properly assessed, freely choosing, with nobody who stands to gain anywhere near the decision.

He argued from a position almost nobody else in Parliament could occupy. He is a C-4 quadriplegic who spent three months on a ventilator unable to speak. When members of the disability community argued that legal assisted death endangered people like him, he answered them directly and disagreed.

Before the bills

He was not the first parliamentarian to raise the question. Francine Lalonde introduced three right-to-die bills before him: C-407 in June 2005, C-562 in 2008, and C-384 in March 2010. It was on the vote on the last of these, defeated at second reading on 21 April 2010, that Fletcher’s own position first entered the record. He did not vote. He rose instead on a point of order to have his abstention recorded and to explain why.

The two bills

On 27 March 2014 he introduced two private member’s bills on the same day, both seconded by his colleague Peter Kent. Bill C-581 would have amended the Criminal Code to permit physician-assisted death, with eligibility criteria, two independent physician assessments, a written request before two disinterested witnesses, a minimum fourteen-day waiting period, and a right of revocation at any time by any means. Bill C-582 would have created a Canadian Commission on Physician-Assisted Death to collect non-identifying data on who was asking and why, publish an annual statistical report, and recommend reform.

Neither bill was drawn into the order of precedence, so neither was debated at second reading or put to a vote, and both died when Parliament was dissolved in 2015. A companion bill, S-225, was introduced in the Senate by Senator Nancy Ruth in December 2014.

When the Supreme Court struck down the prohibition in Carter v. Canada in February 2015, he welcomed the judgment in the House and pressed Parliament to respond rather than let the deadline run. On 24 February 2015 he voted for an opposition motion to create a special committee on the ruling, against his own government. The motion failed.

Documented influence on Bill C-14

Defeated in the 2015 general election, he appeared in 2016 as a private citizen before two parliamentary committees: the Special Joint Committee on Physician-Assisted Dying on 28 January, and the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on 3 May, on Bill C-14. His central objection to the government bill was that its reasonably foreseeable death test did not match what the Supreme Court had said.

The Special Joint Committee’s final report cites him three times: at block-quote length on why the criteria should not be overly restrictive, on advance requests, and on prior review panels.

The clearest trace is at the Justice Committee. At clause-by-clause consideration on 10 May 2016, members cited his testimony while moving to cut the mandatory waiting period from fifteen days to ten. Chris Bittle put it directly: “I look back to Mr. Fletcher’s testimony that if you’re in a state of enduring physical or psychological suffering, 15 days could be 15 lifetimes.” The amendment carried, and the ten-day period was enacted in Bill C-14 in 2016. His testimony was one of several considerations before the committee, not the sole cause of the change.

He was also referred to by five members across a single sitting during the second reading debate on Bill C-14 on 2 May 2016, from three parties, including one member speaking against the bill.

The debate since 2016

The law has moved considerably since. Bill C-7, enacted in 2021, removed the reasonably foreseeable death requirement for one pathway, the restriction Fletcher had objected to in 2016. Eligibility where a mental illness is the sole underlying medical condition remains excluded, delayed by Bill C-62, which received royal assent in February 2024, until 17 March 2027. This is context rather than a claim about cause: these were later decisions of later Parliaments.

Where he stands now

He has not moved on the principle and has been explicit about where he thinks the law has gone too far. Writing in The Globe and Mail in February 2023, under the headline “Before we make it easier to access assisted death, we must improve Canadians’ access to life,” he set out a position that is neither a retreat nor an endorsement of expansion.

He supports assisted dying and says he would have taken it himself in the months after his injury, when he was on a ventilator and unable to speak. He also says the pendulum has swung too far. He opposes eligibility for minors, on the ground that the younger a person is the more hope they should have. He opposes eligibility where mental illness is the sole underlying condition, arguing both that the capacity to make the decision is itself in question and that recent requests citing housing or other social conditions show what happens without safeguards. His alternative is not prohibition but investment: expand resources, services and prevention so that fewer people reach the point of asking.

It is worth stating plainly, because it cuts against the easy version of this page: the man who put the first framework bills before Parliament is also, a decade later, arguing publicly for limits on how far that framework should reach.

He has been asked to make the case at length more than once. When The Economist ran a two-week series on assisted dying in 2018 as part of its Open Future project on the future of liberalism, he was invited to write twice: an opening essay, and a second piece answering the other contributors.

In Steven Fletcher’s words

These citations are as complete as the record now allows. More will be added as they are found, and these pages change as the facts do. Where a source is a recollection rather than a document, it is identified as such.