Faith and/in Medicine: Religious and Conscientious Objections to MAiD

Across Canada, health care institutions that operate under the umbrella of religious traditions refuse to offer medical assistance in dying (MAiD) on the grounds that it violates their Charter-protected rights to freedom of religion and conscience. This article analyses the Supreme Court jurisprudence on section 2(a) and concludes that it should not extend to the protection of institutional rights. While the Court has not definitively pronounced a view on this matter, its jurisprudence suggests that any institutional right to freedom of religion would not extend to decisions on publicly-funded and legal health care. MAiD is a constitutionally-protected option for individuals and both courts and governments should prioritize an individual’s right to access health care over any institutional considerations. Health care regulatory bodies already offer individual health care practitioners the compromise of making an effective referral to a non-objecting colleague in matters that implicate conscientious or religious objections. Institutions may be filled with people, but they are built of bricks and mortar. The institutions themselves should not take a moral stance on this complex social issue. They most certainly should not take an oppositional position to the Charter-protected rights of patients. The author concludes that provincial governments across this country must appreciate their duty to be neutral on matters of conscience and religion and take strong leadership roles in making clear to publicly-funded institutions that they must not deny medical services solely on religious or conscientious grounds. Dans tout le Canada, des établissements de soins de santé qui fonctionnent sous l’égide de traditions religieuses refusent d’offrir l’assistance médicale à mourir au motif que cela viole leur droit à la liberté de religion et de conscience protégé par la Charte. Dans le présent article, nous analysons la jurisprudence de la Cour suprême relative à l’alinéa 2a) et concluons qu’elle ne devrait pas s’étendre à la protection des droits des établissements. Bien que la Cour ne se soit pas définitivement prononcée sur cette question, sa jurisprudence indique que le droit à la liberté de religion d’un établissement ne saurait s’étendre aux décisions relatives aux soins de santé légaux et financés par l’État. L’assistance médicale à mourir est une option protégée par la Constitution et les tribunaux comme les gouvernements devraient donner la priorité au droit d’une personne d’y accéder. Les organismes de réglementation des soins de santé offrent déjà aux praticiens le compromis de référer un patient à un collègue non objecteur dans les cas d’objections de conscience ou religieuses. Les établissements peuvent être remplis de personnes, mais ils sont construits de briques et de mortier. Les établissements eux-mêmes ne devraient pas adopter une position morale sur cette question sociale complexe. Ils ne devraient certainement pas s’opposer au respect des droits des patients protégés par la Charte. L’auteur conclut que les gouvernements provinciaux de tout le pays doivent tenir compte de leur devoir de neutralité sur les questions de conscience et de religion et assumer un rôle de leadership fort en indiquant clairement aux établissements financés par l’État qu’ils ne doivent pas refuser des services médicaux uniquement pour des raisons religieuses ou de conscience

The Silence of Section 15: Searching for Equality at the Supreme Court of Canada in 2007

This paper considers the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2007 section 15 jurisprudence, and analyzes the “year that wasn’t”. The Equality Rights provision was only referred to in four cases, and in each instance the Court’s reasoning was very brief, amounting at best to a handful of paragraphs. While the Supreme Court may have been subdued in its equality rights jurisprudence in 2007, equality-seekers should not ignore what did (or did not) happen in the past year. The author reviews Charkaoui v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), Canada (Attorney General) v. Hislop, Health Services and Support-Facilities Subsector Bargaining Assn. v. British Columbia (B.C. Health Services) and Baier v. Alberta, and considers what the Court said about section 15 in each decision, as well as what might have been said. The author concludes that we should be particularly concerned about the decision in B.C. Health Services, for its failure to consider the intersecting oppressions of gender and occupational status results in serious limitations to understanding intersecting grounds of disadvantage. The 2007 cases might have offered a chance to acknowledge unfortunate developments in section 15 methodology and offer some guidance in restoring a vision of section 15 that focuses on substantive equality. Instead, the Court seriously curtailed the potential of equality litigation and further closed the door to advocates and intervenors interested in progressive equality interpretations

The Silence of Section 15: Searching for Equality at the Supreme Court of Canada in 2007

This paper considers the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2007 section 15 jurisprudence, and analyzes the “year that wasn’t”. The Equality Rights provision was only referred to in four cases, and in each instance the Court’s reasoning was very brief, amounting at best to a handful of paragraphs. While the Supreme Court may have been subdued in its equality rights jurisprudence in 2007, equality-seekers should not ignore what did (or did not) happen in the past year. The author reviews Charkaoui v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), Canada (Attorney General) v. Hislop, Health Services and Support-Facilities Subsector Bargaining Assn. v. British Columbia (B.C. Health Services) and Baier v. Alberta, and considers what the Court said about section 15 in each decision, as well as what might have been said. The author concludes that we should be particularly concerned about the decision in B.C. Health Services, for its failure to consider the intersecting oppressions of gender and occupational status results in serious limitations to understanding intersecting grounds of disadvantage. The 2007 cases might have offered a chance to acknowledge unfortunate developments in section 15 methodology and offer some guidance in restoring a vision of section 15 that focuses on substantive equality. Instead, the Court seriously curtailed the potential of equality litigation and further closed the door to advocates and intervenors interested in progressive equality interpretations

Asymptotic methods in the spectral analysis of Sturm-Liouville operators

Gilbert, D.: Asymptotic Methods in the Spectral Analysis of Sturm-Lioville Operators.Sturm-Liouville theory : Past and Present, 2005, pp 121-136

Bounds for the points of spectral concentration of sturm-liouville problems

§1. Introduction. We consider the spectral function ρα(λ) associated with the Sturm–Liouville equation with the boundary conditio

Higher derivatives of spectral functions associated with one-dimensional schrodinger operators

We investigate the existence and asymptotic behaviour of higher derivatives of the spectral function in the context of one-dimensional Schr¨odinger operators on the half-line with integrable potentials. In particular, we identify sufficient conditions on the potential for the existence and continuity of the n-th derivative, and outline a systematic procedure for estimating numerical upper bounds for the turning points of such derivatives. Explicit worked examples illustrate the development and application of the theory

The spectral function for Sturm-Liouville problems where the potential is of Wigner-von Neumann type or slowly decaying

We consider the linear, second-order, differential equation (∗) with the boundary condition (∗∗) We suppose that q(x) is real-valued, continuously differentiable and that q(x)→0 as x→∞ with q∉L1[0,∞). Our main object of study is the spectral function ρα(λ) associated with () and (). We derive a series expansion for this function, valid for λ⩾Λ0 where Λ0 is computable and establish a Λ1, also computable, such that () and () with α=0, have no points of spectral concentration for λ⩾Λ1. We illustrate our results with examples. In particular we consider the case of the Wigner–von Neumann potential

Reading Interest and Behavior in Middle School Students in Innercity and Rural Settings

We examined the reading interest and behavior of students in one rural (n = 664) and one inner-city (n = 510) middle school. Responses to the questionnaire indicated that in general, middle school students are not interested in reading and spend very little time engaged in various reading activities. Further analysis of the data showed differences among school, gender, and grade in responses to the questionnaire. Therefore, although one can make broad claims about middle school students, we propose that it may be useful to look also at different groups of middle school students when trying to make decisions concerning this population

The evolution of mammalian brain size

Relative brain size has long been considered a reflection of cognitive capacities and has played a fundamental role in developing core theories in the life sciences. Yet, the notion that relative brain size validly represents selection on brain size relies on the untested assumptions that brain-body allometry is restrained to a stable scaling relationship across species and that any deviation from this slope is due to selection on brain size. Using the largest fossil and extant dataset yet assembled, we find that shifts in allometric slope underpin major transitions in mammalian evolution and are often primarily characterized by marked changes in body size. Our results reveal that the largest-brained mammals achieved large relative brain sizes by highly divergent paths. These findings prompt a reevaluation of the traditional paradigm of relative brain size and open new opportunities to improve our understanding of the genetic and developmental mechanisms that influence brain size