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There will be only one question before the National Parole Board when Robert Latimer asks for day parole at a hearing today: Is he safe to release? The answer is obvious. Mr. Latimer, who killed his disabled daughter Tracy in 1993, poses no threat to anyone.

It should not matter if he is not remorseful about his actions, or if he says that, given the chance, he would do the same thing again. He is not to be punished for holding to his view of himself, of his 12-year-old daughter and of his crime. His insistence on believing himself in the right is his right.

All that matters is that, by the terms of a strict law, his decision to kill Tracy to end what he saw as her intolerable suffering has been denounced by society. (He killed her by running a hose from the exhaust pipe to the cab of his truck where she sat.) He has served his seven-year waiting period for day parole for Tracy's second-degree murder. There was no room in the law to take into account that the crime was an act of parental compassion. Murder carries a mandatory sentence of life, and second-degree murder has as its earliest date for full-parole eligibility 10 years; day parole is possible three years before that.

The long jail term was just, because Tracy did not and could not consent to the ending of her life, because compassion does not justify murder, and because there were other options available to Mr. Latimer. But no more denunciation of him is needed to make the point.

The Latimer case goes to the heart of what it is to be human, what

value there is in a disabled child's life, and what it is to be a loving

parent. Tracy had cerebral palsy; she was quadriplegic and mostly bed-

ridden. She had the mental capacity of a four-month-old baby, had five or six seizures a day, was spoon-fed, and faced the prospect of multiple operations, in part to lessen the pain she would be in from the effects of those operations. On the other hand, she enjoyed music, bonfires, being with her family and the circus; she recognized family members and liked being gently rocked by her parents.

The jury that convicted Mr. Latimer was convinced that he acted not out of selfish motives but purely to end what he perceived as his daughter's great suffering. It recommended he receive just one year in prison. The trial judge also felt that Mr. Latimer's motives were selfless and loving. He attempted to grant him a constitutional exemption to the 10-year wait for parole, and sentenced him to a year in jail and a year's probation. When the Supreme Court of Canada rejected the trial judge's argument that the 10-year wait for a parole hearing was cruel and unusual punishment for Mr. Latimer's act of compassion, it deferred to Parliament's wish to protect the vulnerable. It was right to do so.

Mr. Latimer's punishment was controversial, but his parole is not. When he steps into the blessed cold of a Prairie winter, most Canadians will breathe a sigh of relief for him.