Mount Royal MP and chair of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights Anthony Housefather. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

The Liberal government’s assisted dying legislation, Bill C-14, survived intact through day one of the clause-by-clause consideration by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. Liberal MPs on the committee defended it against a flurry of suggested changes from opposition parties, leaving key contentious clauses in the bill unchanged.

While small technical changes proposed by Liberals passed, dozens of significant amendments proposed by Conservative, Bloc Quebecois, Green and NDP MPs were shot down, one by one. Those hoping for a radical re-write of the bill, or changing the wording surrounding eligibility criteria, will have to look to the Senate instead.

Committee chair Anthony Housefather told reporters Monday ahead of the meeting that about one hundred amendments have been put forward total. A majority, he said — roughly half — were put forward by Conservatives.

Bloc MP Luc Theriault and NDP MP Murray Rankin proposed amendments aimed at removing a main sticking point – the phrase “reasonably foreseeable” death. The term is an eligibility criteria for assisted-death which plaintiff lawyers from the Carter case have argued delimits the phrase “grievous and irremediable” to those terminally ill, and would ultimately have excluded Kay Carter.

Liberal MP Ron McKinnon said the issue strikes at the heart of the bill, but added that “if we delete these lines, there’s nothing left.”

Liberal MP Rob Oliphant, who does not usually sit on the committee and criticized that the bill is too narrow on eligibility criteria, appeared and urged other Liberals to support the amendment, only to be followed by Liberal MP Sean Casey reading out a written statement iterating the government’s position against it. Rankin told the committee’s MPs that they are there to put “meat on the bones of a unanimous Supreme Court decision,” but he said the current version of the bill “undercuts” that. It was defeated 8-1.

With a similar motion from the Green Party that would have removed the word “incurable” from the definition, Elizabeth May said it’s “very clear that the word ‘incurable’ goes against what the court decided,” and warned its inclusion means the legislation won’t be Charter compliant. It too was defeated. Later, on another defeated point, she pleaded to Liberal committee members to adopt at least one opposition amendment.

Among the first amendments defeated was a proposal promoted by Conservative MP Ted Falk to remove criminal code protections for nurse practitioners from the bill.

“We don’t even allow them today to issue prescriptions with narcotics,” he said, suggesting they shouldn’t be involved in the process at all.

Another amendment, voted down 6 to 3, would have changed the process to mandate prior judicial approval. Falk said judicial reviews in the current interim period, while legislation is absent, has so far worked “quite well” in creating an adequate “check and balance” in reviewing cases. Liberal MP Chris Bittle argued that kind of change would make the process too restrictive, and available only for those who have money, while Liberal PM Ahmed Hussen said he was concerned it would tie up the courts. Following that, a somewhat similar amendment aimed at having the Health Minister approve each request for assisted dying also failed.

Rankin also tried to bring forward an amendment on advance directives – which would allow for consenting to medically assisted death ahead of time; for example, in instances where someone might lose their mental capacity, such as someone with Alzheimer’s. Rankin suggested it would be a “natural progression” from ‘do not resuscitate’ orders and that Canadians are responsible enough to handle it. It was defeated 8-1.

Liberal MP Colin Fraser said he opposed it because a future Liberal caucus motion, likely one of the last which will be considered, would instead speed up study of advance directives to within 180 days of the legislation receiving royal assent.

Conservative MP Garnett Genuis told iPolitics he was disappointed to see the Liberals vote “virtually all together” against opposition amendments, and that they weren’t open to even modest proposals by Conservatives.

“This bill does not provide any kind of clarity, it does not provide any meaningful safeguards,” he said. “I voted against the bill at second reading, and by all indication we’ll have an almost identical bill coming to us at third reading.”

And, he warned, it’s not a guaranteed “slam dunk.”

“Although it passed with substantial margin at second reading, many, many members at second reading were saying they’d vote it through to committee — but they wanted to see a serious good faith effort to amend and improve the bill at committee.”

Rankin, afterward, said he won’t support the current bill.

Housefather told reporters the committee will work to get “as best a piece of legislation back to the House this week, or hopefully as soon as possible.”

The Liberals have maintained they need to meet a legislative deadline of June 6 set by the Supreme Court to create a legal framework for assisted dying in Canada to comply with the Carter v. Canada decision, which legalized medical assistance in death in the country.

Note: An earlier version of this article had mistakenly said that Bill Casey read a statement on the government’s position; however, it was in fact Sean Casey, the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Justice.