Madam Speaker, it is always an honour to rise in the chamber. We have been discussing very profound issues today, perhaps some of the most profound issues we can ever discuss in Parliament, which are life and death. We are discussing the deaths of loved ones and the deaths of those who have no one to love them, yet this is all happening in the context of Bill C-39, which absolutely fails the test of profundity because it is a last-minute scramble. It is a papering over of an absolute failure to deal with something that should have been dealt with from the beginning, and the government continues to drop the ball, so I am going to speak a bit on how we got here.
It is really important in this debate to be careful with the language we use and to be careful with each other. I have heard it alluded to that this was some kind of Nazi regime, which is ridiculous. I have heard people talk about being loved and other people saying that we are not respecting rights. We are talking about the most intimate acts that a human experiences: birth and death.
It may sound odd to say that death is an intimate act. Death can be very traumatic. Death can be violent. Death can really tear families apart, but it can also bring families together. It is those moments of how we confront death and value death that really show who we are as a society. I am thinking right now of my sister Kathleen, who never made it out of her 50s. This week would have been her birthday. Nobody got a rawer deal in life than my sister. She got the bad end of the cards dealt to her every single time, and Doc Holliday had nothing on her when it came to facing down death.
I remember, as she was dying, that every morning she insisted that she look good, and her back was disintegrating from the cancer. One of us got the nerve to ask her about MAID. Man, she almost bit our heads off because that will to live, the will to be there one more day through the pain, was very, very profound.
I remember we sent her off singing Danny Boy because that is how we say goodbye. That is how we said goodbye to her husband when he died just before her, and to my dad and to my grandfather. Those are intimate moments. However, her death, and a natural death it was, was not somehow superior to those of people who have chosen MAID.
I think of my friend Liz from Vancouver Island. Wow, she was a force. She called me and said, “I can't live with the pain anymore and I'm choosing the date.” I spoke to her the day before she went. I had a sense that this was also a very profound moment.
I think of my friend Craig from CBC. I followed his last two weeks on Facebook because he posted every day. It was a very powerful thing to see someone choose that moment and choose how they were going to tell their story in those final two weeks.
We have to respect the choices that people make. The provision for MAID that was brought in was about ensuring that a fundamental respect was given. However, the flaw goes back to the fact that we are not just individuals. We are not just individuals with rights. We are brothers, fathers, uncles, sisters, aunts. We have come from family, and family is part of it because death without family is traumatic. That is a tearing apart.
We come from communities and a death in our community can be traumatic if we are not part of it. We come from neighbourhoods. I think of my father when he died, and he lived up in a townhouse project in north Scarborough. The neighbours were coming all hours of the day and night. They were Sri Lankan, Italian and South Asian families who could not speak English but who would say, “We brought food for Mr. John”, because he was part of the neighbourhood.
Those moments of death are about our involvement with each other, and what concerns me with the changes that have been suggested to MAID, is that it is about separating those who are vulnerable, those who are isolated and those with mental distress from the larger community, which needs to hold them and care for them. We as legislators cannot just say that it is an individual choice. This is a societal choice we are making, and we are making it now on behalf of very vulnerable people who need our back.
We cannot just say, “They are depressed. They have always been depressed. It is their right. They are individuals.” That is a failure of our obligation to be there as a neighbourhood, as a community, as a family to hold them and to get them through the darkness.
How did we get here? There is a lot of blame, enough to go around. We knew that the issue of medical assistance in dying was fundamentally an issue that Parliament had to confront. This was our job as legislators. It was a hard job, but it was our job. The Stephen Harper government just decided to ignore it. It did nothing on this, even though we all knew it was coming.
Then the Carter decision came down. The Supreme Court stepped in. I think it was a failure for the court to step in and do the job parliamentarians should have done. What it did was put a timeline, because it said it did not have faith in Parliament. I think it was also a mistake that the Supreme Court put such a short timeline, because these were profound decisions we were making.
Then, the original bill passed. I had a lot of questions about that bill. I had real concerns about what the protections were and how it would be implemented. When we talk about someone whose death is foreseeable, who is suffering from pain they cannot deal with it, how do we make sure that the legislation is not opening the door to something much broader? We were told at the time as parliamentarians to vote for the legislation and that we would have a review. I trusted that. I thought it was fair. I had a lot of questions, but I recognized there were legal obligations. We had the Supreme Court's ruling and Parliament would have a chance to look at this. We were never given that opportunity. Parliament was never given the right to see the effects of the legislation we brought in.
Then the Truchon decision came in, where a Quebec court said that, with the charter provisions, limiting it to a foreseeable death was not fair and we had to throw the legislation out. That was a time when I think it would have been reasonable for the federal government to bring that to the Supreme Court and ask for a review. It did not do that. It accepted it. I think of how many decisions went in favour of indigenous communities and the government went all the way to the Supreme Court every single time, but on the Truchon decision it did not. That was another opportunity for it to say that the legislation was being expanded, perhaps for good, perhaps for bad, and that it needed to be reviewed. Still, Parliament did not get the chance to do the review.
Then it went to the Senate, of all places, the unelected, unaccountable Senate. These are people who cannot be fired once they hired. They can do whatever they want. They can show up or not show up. They sent us back a bill that said they wanted Parliament, the elected members, to approve their change, which was that if people are depressed they should be able to die.
The government should have rejected that bill outright. It should have told the senators that, number one, they are not elected, not accountable, and that it was a ridiculous provision. It did not, so the bill sat on the Attorney General's desk, to come into effect this coming St. Patrick's Day. Now we are scrambling. We have to deal with this bill. It is not that we are responding to the bill; we are putting it off for another year.
I will support that, but I think it is a complete failure of our obligation to deal with something that needs to be reflected on and needs a profound answer from parliamentarians. It needs for us to stand up and ask what is right, what is fair and what provisions have to be in place to protect the vulnerable, particularly those who, in a moment of darkness, think they want to end their life.
I looked at the statistics of how MAID has been applied, and that alone would cause any parliamentarian to say that we should look at this. In 2016, 1,200 people died by MAID. It more than doubled in 2017. It more than doubled again in 2018, to over 5,000, and to over 10,950 in 2021. That is 30 people every single day in this country deciding to end their life.
That is double all the deaths from breast cancer in this nation. It is more than double the national suicide rate, and we are not going to reflect and say, wait a minute, is this opening the door to a place where we should not have gone, and where none of us thought we were going, when more than double the deaths of what we see in the suicide epidemic in this country are from people going to the doctor and saying they just do not want to be here anymore?
We could be told that there are protections and measurements in place, and we have been told that. I heard that at all the hearings. Then we get examples. I do not want to wave around one example and say that this is proof of what went wrong and the perfidy of the government, but I look at an Associated Press article on Alan Nichols, who had a history of depression and mental illness, and the police brought him to the hospital because they were afraid that he was going to kill himself. His family said that we had to help him, that he had a history of mental illness. He decided to apply for MAID and he was dead. That is an outrage. His family was asking for help for him, but he was treated as an individual in his own right who could just come into the hospital, brought in by the police, who were trying to keep him alive.
I think of the suicide rates that we have had in the communities I represent. Some of the highest suicide rates in the world are in northern Canada, and we have done jack about that.
In 2019, I brought Motion No. 174 to this House, calling for a national suicide prevention action plan, and every single member of the House voted for that. I heard all the speeches, that we have to protect the vulnerable, that we are going to be there for them, that the government has a role to play. We voted for that, and nothing was done, nothing. People continue to die.
Now we have this panic legislation to say, oh my God, let us just put off for another year the fact that people just have to be depressed and they can walk in and say “I want to die” and we will let them die. One could be depressed for all manner of reasons. In Belgium, which had medically assisted suicide for many years, one can claim it for PTSD. My God, will PTSD be a reason for it? It could be depression, or injury at work. Yes, it is a crappy life to have serious chronic pain. It is going to be a crappy life, especially if people do not have a proper pension or a proper place to live, but they will be able to go, as an individual, and say “I want to die.” Are we going to let that happen on our watch? I do not think so.
Again, this is not about my moral choices over someone else's moral choices. This is about who we are as a society, whom we protect and whom we leave on the sidelines.
In Motion No. 174, to establish a national suicide prevention action plan, there were many factors that we brought in because we met with organizations across the country. We talked about what it would take to have a holistic life-supporting system for people in crisis. We talked about establishing national guidelines for best practices in suicide prevention based on the evidence and effectiveness, in a Canadian context. We said we would work to establish culturally appropriate community-based suicide prevention programs by the representative organizations of the Inuit, first nations and Métis people so that they would run the programs that work for them and they would be culturally appropriate.
We said we would create a national public health monitoring program for the prevention of suicide and the identification of groups at elevated risk. That is really important, because when we know where the elevated risks are, we know where to put resources. We talked about the creation of programs to identify and fill gaps in knowledge related to suicide and its prevention, including timely and accurate statistical data. Once again, if we do not know what the data looks like, we have no way to help. It is not the role of the government to go in and do emergency crisis prevention in every single case. That is not what we do, and we would be terrible at it, but it is that information, the analysis and being able to show where the shortfalls are that would allow funding to flow.
There would be the creation of a national online hub, providing essential information in assessing the programs in the various languages: English, French, indigenous and the other languages spoken in Canada. We would conduct, within 18 months, a comprehensive analysis of high-risk groups of people, the risk factors specific to each group, and the degree to which sexual abuse and other forms of childhood abuse and neglect have an impact on suicidal behaviour.
We would assess the barriers for Canadians in accessing appropriate and adequate health, wellness and recovery services, including substance use, addiction and bereavement services, and the funding arrangements required to provide treatment, education, professional training and other supports required to prevent suicide and assist those bereaved by a loved one's suicide. We would look at the use of culturally appropriate suicide prevention activities and best practices, and study the role social media plays with respect to suicide and suicide prevention.
If the government had done those things, then yes, it could come in and tell me it will pass this Senate bill allowing people who are mentally depressed to kill themselves. It could tell me that it has actually done the analysis and presented the information to Parliament, and then we would look at it and know where the gaps are. However, if the government has not done any of that work, it should not tell me that we are going to pass a bill that will let someone who has no support, no backup and no help say that life is tough and it is game over for them. This was the final thing we voted for in this Parliament. I know a lot of people were taking pictures and doing press releases about how great it was that they were standing up on suicide prevention.
There should be an annual report to Parliament on preparations for and implementation of the national action plan for suicide prevention, including data on progress over the previous year and a comprehensive statistical overview of suicide in Canada for the year. If we had done that in 2019, if we had four years of statistics, if we had facts and we knew where the mental health dollars needed to go, if we were not just putting it out willy-nilly but actually had statistics, then we could talk about maybe, in certain circumstances, after all these other areas have been exhausted and after all these other supports have failed, a person who may have no other choice. However, that person, in the midst of darkness today, has none of those other supports because nobody at the federal level bothered to put that in place. We have seen our provincial government fail in so many areas as well.
I was deeply concerned when I heard the Attorney General do a podcast on this legislation. He deliberately connected the change of MAID to the right to kill oneself. He said:
Remember that suicide generally is available to people. This is a group within the population [meaning the people who might need MAID] who, for physical and possibly mental reasons, can't make that choice to do it themselves. Ultimately, this provides a more humane way for them to make a decision they otherwise would have made if they were able in some other way.
That is the Attorney General of Canada saying they physically cannot do it, they might not be smart enough to do it and they might be too depressed, but they have a right to kill themselves. That is what he said on a podcast just recently.
When I am told we are going to delay this for a year, I will vote to delay it for a year, but I want to see a plan to address this. I want to see the statistics that prove how this is being used, whether it is being exploited and whether the vulnerable are being targeted or being led to use this because there are no other supports. Until that happens, the last thing we should do as a Parliament of Canada is open the door further for more people to die.
