Issues & Impact

In 2014 Steven Fletcher introduced two bills proposing a federal framework for physician-assisted death, one setting eligibility and safeguards, the other creating an independent monitoring commission. Neither reached a vote, but both preceded the Supreme Court’s Carter decision and Parliament’s 2016 law.

Manitoba has repeatedly faced the problem of matching major hydroelectric investments with reliable, well-priced export markets. For nearly two decades Steven Fletcher has argued that stronger east-west transmission could improve reliability, widen the market for clean power, and reduce dependence on north-south exports.

In June 2005, as an opposition backbencher, Steven Fletcher won House of Commons approval by 231 votes to 53 for a motion calling on the government to fully fund and implement the Canadian Strategy for Cancer Control, alongside national strategies for mental illness and heart disease.

Minister of State for Democratic Reform from October 2008 to May 2011, responsible for a reform programme spanning Senate ethics, terms and selection, representation by population, advance voting and the financing of politics. He returned to the same arguments in the Manitoba Legislature from 2016, and from 2017 made them as an independent member.

He made the same argument on his first day in the House of Commons in 2004 and on one of his last in 2015. Canada has become very good at saving people, and much less good at letting them live afterwards.

A geological engineer’s argument that the real question is not whether to protect land or mine it, but where to do each, and that the answer should be chosen deliberately rather than by accident.

In 2005, as Official Opposition health critic, Steven Fletcher moved the Health Committee motion for immediate compensation, carried it to the floor of the House, and won a unanimous recorded vote, 269 to 0, putting Parliament formally behind the Canadians the hepatitis C blood settlement had left out. The new government reached a separate settlement in 2006, completed that December and approved by the courts in 2007.

As Minister of State for Transport, Steven Fletcher led the government’s presentation of the Fair Rail Freight Service Act at second reading in 2013. The Act required railways to respond to shipper requests for service agreements and created binding arbitration when commercial negotiations failed. Its principal beneficiaries were grain, mining, forestry and other bulk shippers whose facilities were often dependent on one railway and therefore lacked the bargaining power a customer normally has.

Steven Fletcher’s own catastrophic injury put him up against the limits of Manitoba’s no-fault insurance. When the courts held that the cap on his care was inadequate but a matter for the legislature rather than the bench, he later became a legislator and moved to change it.

Three times between 2017 and 2018, Steven Fletcher introduced The Gift of Life Act, which would have made every Manitoban a presumed organ donor unless they opted out. None of the bills passed. Nova Scotia adopted the same model in 2021, the first jurisdiction in North America to do so.

Steven Fletcher tried more than once to modernise Manitoba’s conflict-of-interest law for members of the Legislature. His bill went the furthest of any he introduced as an MLA before the governing majority voted it down in 2018, and the refusal is hard to square with the federal record: the same Conservatives, Fletcher and Premier Brian Pallister among them, had voted to tighten Ottawa’s accountability rules in 2006.

Steven Fletcher proposed cutting the Manitoba Legislature from 57 seats to 49, a smaller and cheaper assembly for a province of Manitoba’s size. Like his other private member’s bills, it did not pass, but it put a concrete number on a question most legislatures avoid asking about themselves.

In 2019 Steven Fletcher introduced the Indigenous Representation and Related Amendments Act, Bill 231, which would have created four dedicated Indigenous divisions in the Manitoba Legislature. It borrowed the idea of reserved seats from New Zealand but departed from it in a telling way, letting every voter, Indigenous or not, choose which ballot to cast. The bill did not advance.