The court's reinstatement of the mandatory 10-year sentence has been supported by groups who speak for the disabled. Others are opposing the sentence as too harsh. Supporters of Latimer held a demonstration January 24 outside the Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, correctional center to demand clemency. "The people are asking the justice minister to intervene and reduce the sentence for Robert and that he serve a sentence at home on his farm," said Bill Risling, an organizer of the protest.

Latimer's desperate action and Tracy's death underline once again how, for working people in capitalist society, caring for the young, the disabled, and the elderly is thrust on the individual family with little or no assistance from the state.

This case underlines the urgent need for the unions and the entire labor movement to organize a fight to make health care a right available to all and financed by the state. Otherwise working people will continue to have to make daily life-and-death decisions about themselves, family members, and other loved ones based on their ability to continue to provide care and needed medication. Only when a health care system is run in the interests of working people can humane decisions, free from financial and individual pressures, be made about how long to prolong the life of terminally ill patients.

On Oct. 24, 1993, Latimer placed Tracy, 12, in his truck and fed exhaust fumes into it. Tracy suffered from a severe form of cerebral palsy and was in continual pain. Her right hip was dislocating frequently. She was due for an operation to remove her hip. She had already had several operations and had up to six epileptic fits a day. She had the mental age of a four-year-old and required constant attention by her parents.

Latimer responded angrily to a previous decision to sentence him to a life sentence. The continuation of medical treatment of Tracy, he said, was the "promotion of torture, mutilation, [and] force-feeding, just so that some poor little child can survive a few more days and endure that much more torture. It's illogical."

Latimer was first tried in 1994. His conviction for second-degree murder was thrown out after it was revealed that the prosecution had interfered with the jury selection. He was again found guilty in 1997. The judge, under pressure from the jury, invoked a little-used clause and sentenced Latimer to a one-year jail term and one year of house arrest instead of the mandatory 10 years in prison. The case was appealed up to the Supreme Court, which reimposed the 10-year sentence. Mandatory sentencing is part of the "law and order" campaign by the wealthy rulers of Canada.

The Supreme Court judges cited three reasons in rejecting Latimer's defense. They said that Tracy was not in imminent peril or at the point of dying and that Latimer had a reasonable legal alternative. "He could have struggled on," the ruling said. The court also ruled that the harm inflicted was disproportionate to the harm avoided.

The Supreme Court justices said nothing of the situation of children and of health care in Canada. If they had, they would have had to point out that one in five children live in poverty. Infant mortality is twice as high among native people as in the population as a whole. And that the cutting of $36 billion in payments from the federal government to the provinces has led to a serious deterioration in the quality of health care.

Commenting on the lack of adequate care for those in pain, Dr. Réjean Thomas told the Montreal daily La Presse, "The only response we get generally is that remedial care is there for reducing suffering. But what is less well known is that only 10 percent of those sick really have access to remedial care." The Supreme Court justices were also silent on the lack of services available to parents who have handicapped children. An article in the January 20 Globe and Mail, subtitled "Parents of disabled children say they must battle aggressively to get support they need," cited the example of Gwen Caudle from Mississauga, Ontario, who had a severely disabled 10-year-old daughter. "There was no financial help, or any residential care available in her community," the article said. "So last year Ms. Caude gave up custody of Julie to the Children's Aid Society, which placed her in a group home."

According to the article, the Toronto Association for Community Living, which provides about two-thirds of the city's services for the disabled, has group home beds for 280 adults. Some 900 families are on the waiting list.

Groups that claim to speak for the disabled supported the Supreme Court decision. Jim Derksen, chairman of the human rights committee of the Winnipeg-based Council of Canadians with Disabilities, said, "It is a comfort to know that we are citizens as others and that the law will protect us." One of Canada's two national papers, The Globe and Mail, stated in an editorial, "To excuse or diminish Mr. Latimer's offence because he had been a caring father in heartbreaking circumstances would send a signal to other care givers for severely disabled children or adults that, if they took upon themselves the role of executioner, society would see their murders as somehow worthier and more understandable than most killings."

Travis Pohl, a co-worker of mine, said of the court's judgment, "I think it was harsh. He shouldn't serve any time. I think he thought he had no alternative. He couldn't stand to see his daughter in pain. He had no where else to turn. He didn't want to do it but he thought it was necessary."

I have been pointing out the need for workers and farmers to fight for the state to provide such services today and to replace the current capitalist government with one of our own. Such a government would put human needs, including the care and rights of disabled people, as its starting point. Explaining the advances working people have made in Cuba as a result of a successful revolutionary struggle to overturn capitalism and chart a course toward building socialism has been useful as well. In Cuba, where human solidarity is the cornerstone of all social relations, health care is available to all at no charge. It is unthinkable in Cuba that any working person would have to face a situation like that forced on the Latimer family.

Joe Young is a production worker in a meatpacking plant in Vancouver.  
 
 
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