Whether Trudeau supports it or not, didn't the existing federal law compel the intrusion?
No.
So there are laws, but they're optional? Hmm...who is being the anarchist now?
On the basis that the law offends against the Charter - and that people's constitutional right (as upheld by the Supreme Court) to avoid unbearable suffering in the context of a terminal disease should not have to await lazy federal legislators, when Québec has already worked on this issue for six years and is ready to go.
A law that offends is still a law until it isn't. It's probably best, starting with the assistant in an assisted suicide, that all the legal check boxes are ticked. It's not quite the same as when a person decides to break the existing laws around possession of marijuana, by possessing it.
Where do you read that every violation of the Criminal Code has to be prosecuted?
Well, you know it might help if they came out with a list of the ones they're not bothering with anymore, because there's a few I'd like to run out and violate right now.
And the job of prosecution is up to the provinces, not the federal government.
Yes, and so they're provided with the CCC as alternative reading?
For starters, any law which has been ruled as unconstitutional.
Usually in those situations a time limit is given to re-write or quash the relevant sections of the code. In the meantime, as with cases involving medicinal marijuana, a person couldn't plant a crop the instant a court ruled the law against planting your own is unconstitutional. That would make the court the drafter and approver of laws. That activist label gets thrown around enough already with respect to the courts.
How could an "actual assisted suicide" be successfully challenged after the fact? Who would challenge it - some crown counsel somewhere? And if they did, which court would find guilt, knowing that on appeal, the basis of conviction would [b]necessarily still[/b] be held to be unconstitutional?
Oh, you know, grieving relatives and what not. You never know where their grief will take them. It would be difficult to tell where such a complaint would come from if legal ambiguity was present.