Catherine Frazee wrote the following response to the Taking Mercy – 16 x 9 Global News segment. This was a Global News segment that was aired in March 2012 that attempted to redefine the Latimer case and it featured a woman named Annette Corriveau, who wanted the right to have her adult children with disabilities euthanized. Catherine wrote the following article and published it on her blog.

By Catherine Frazee

A
slow pan to a classic frame. A solitary man stands on high ground in
evening light, surveying land, sky, and settlement. The soundtrack is
subtle but arresting: distant wind, giving way to the soft but urgent
tapping of a single atmospheric note, then a persistent throb of airy,
fluttering strings. The narrator’s solemn voice begins:

“Robert Latimer. Canadian canola farmer. Father of three. And convicted of second-degree murder.…”

In
a mere 14 seconds, with spare and careful strokes, the argument is
made. It emerges, irresistibly, from an iconic portrait – a portrait
shaded in Canadian idiom, invoking the stoic endurance of a northern
people. Farming: the patient work of nature’s stewards. Fatherhood: the primal calling to selfless nurture and protection. Even Canola: the quintessential expression of a nation’s self-reliant, can-do ingenuity.

Only problem is, it’s all bunk. Sometimes a man standing on a bluff is just that — a man standing on a bluff.
For
nearly 20 years since Robert Latimer asphyxiated his disabled daughter
Tracy in 1993, people with deep understandings of disability have
laboured to call that bluff. Yet our efforts in this regard are
perpetually undercut by the powerful cultural memes that are so
skillfully reproduced in this short segment of the faux-documentary, Taking Mercy.

A
meme, according to Malcolm Gladwell, “is an idea that behaves like a
virus – that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it
infects”. Memes build and mutate from what is comfortable and familiar.
Conjure up a man who works the soil with his hands, a man who stands
erect against the wind, a man who holds his rightful place on the rugged
plains of the western frontier. Say no more. We know this man, this
farmer, this father, this Canadian.

But
this man, in this frame, a killer? Now it is not just one man who
stands sullied. Suddenly, the memes that sustain his ‘salt-of-the-earth’
persona are sorely threatened. The stakes are high. The wagons circle.
Dip the killer in a redemptive wash of mercy and all is secure again in a
small and tidy world. If Tracy’s death was merciful, then the crime of
murder, like a mutating meme, becomes an honourable act that more
comfortably settles on the shoulders of the noble figure in the
landscape.

I’ve
had many occasions to voice my outrage at Robert Latimer’s crime, and
my horror at the wave of support that rose as his arrest and multiple
trials turned through the cycles of front page news. Tracy is 19 years
dead. Robert is again a free man, after 7 years in prison, and 2 ½ years
on day parole.

I
have no desire to rekindle the flame of this man’s still unrepentant
posture that ending Tracy’s life was a blameless act. My quarrel here is
not with a Saskatchewan farmer, or an Ontario mother, or any other
horribly misguided parent seeking to end the life of a disabled child.
My quarrel is with the clichés and platitudes that both foster and
condone a very particular homicidal impulse. It is a preposterous notion
that Tracy’s life did not conform to the law of nature that Robert
somehow epitomizes. The simplistic morality of pitting the “law of
nature” against the “law of a nation” – the core assertion of Global’s Taking Mercy – must be exposed for what it is: a fundamentally eugenic rhetoric.

Meme-makers
and media moguls, take heed. Return with us to that escarpment. Dress
us in Gore-Tex and Lycra, and frame us in the dusky rose glow of
evening. Fill our lungs with clean, sharp air and thrill our senses with
the chatter of small hungry creatures. Haul the gear that we live by –
our wheelchairs, ventilators, feeding pumps – on the same rail that
carries the HD gear to capture your beauty shot. Imagine us – find us –
alive and fully in our element, and witness the unfolding of a new
narrative. Poised on this mighty landscape, all crumpled and decrepit
and gorgeous, we dare you to doubt our will for life.

We
cannot have Tracy back. But we can and shall have back this landscape.
We can and shall reject the dangerous notion that Robert’s life is
natural, and that Tracy’s somehow was not. We can and shall reclaim, for
the young prairie woman of 32 who would have been Tracy Latimer, a
place among the Maples.

Link – Council of Canadians with Disabilities response to the Taking Mercy Global News segment.
Link – Alex Schadenberg response to the Taking Mercy Global News segment.