Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Yorkton—Melville.
Dr. Heidi Janz, the committee chair of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, expressed her alarm at the breakneck speed at which the finance committee was operating. She called on members of the committee to extend public consultations on the legislation. I agree with her. We are moving way too quickly on this issue.
One of my constituents told me back in February that we need to slow this down. We also have to remember that we are here because of the WE scandal and the prorogation. That took away over a month of time we could have been debating this issue in the House. That has caused this to become a panic and there is a supposed rush to get this done.
I thought it important to repeat a few things. Sometimes Canadians, as they watch these debates, may get confused as we talk about things. I wanted to summarize a couple of quick points.
We are here because of the Truchon case from the Quebec Superior Court. This talks about the section in the current law that said death must be reasonably foreseeable. It struck it down and said it needed to be changed. That was the start of this particular bill.
The government chose to not appeal that, which is unusual. Normally, when a lower court makes a ruling against a government bill, especially one that is significant, the government of the day appeals, in this case, to the Quebec Court of Appeal and ultimately the Supreme Court. The government, for whatever reason, decided not to appeal it. Because of that, this bill will now be open to those who are chronically ill and chronically disabled.
They specifically excluded people with mental illness as opposed to excluding, say, people who are paraplegics. To me, this is arbitrary: it is picking winners and losers, and it is certainly going to make this legislation, if it passes, open to a charter challenge.
I also want to mention safeguards that have been removed in this legislation, such as the 10-day reflection period. As one of my colleagues mentioned this morning, since the MAID legislation has been in place, 263 Canadians who chose to pursue MAID changed their minds within the 10-day reflection period and did not pursue it. That is 263 Canadian lives that were saved because of the 10-day reflection period. That reflection period is gone, and future Canadians who might make that choice will not be saved if this goes through.
Another safeguard that has been removed is final consent. One can now give advance consent for this procedure. This is a problem for me, because we do not know, when the time comes, if the person wants to go through with this procedure because consent is not required anymore.
The other thing is that the current legislation requires two witnesses to agree that this makes sense for the individual. That is now down to one witness. There is no need for witnesses to agree. Just one person has to say it.
I also want to mention the new 90-day waiting period safeguard that has been added for those for whom death is not reasonably foreseeable. I do not think that 90 days is long enough.
For example, if someone has a spinal cord injury, that injury may not even have begun to recover within 90 days. In Ontario, if someone needs access to specialized long-term care, it takes on average 126 days to get it. If someone needs a specialized pain clinic, the median time to get that is five and a half months. Even something as simple as applying for a CPP disability benefit takes 120 days. All of those are far longer than 90 days. In my opinion, 90 days is too short for a waiting period.
The disability community has been very vocal since this has come out. I want to mention a few quotes. The first is from Inclusion Canada. It said, “By providing MAID beyond end of life circumstances to Canadians with disabilities, Canada would signal that these Canadians are expendable and threaten their lives, dignity and belonging.”
Canadian Physicians for Life stated, “This Bill prejudices marginalized patients to the incidental effects of a regime that endorses death as an appropriate response to non-life-threatening illness and disability. Furthermore, this Bill not only creates an unavoidable risk that some individuals could actually be euthanized against their true wishes, it increases that risk by removing key safeguards that ensure such requests are valid in the first place.”
The Christian Legal Fellowship said, “The risks created by this Bill—risks that will have a devastating impact on marginalized Canadians—are grossly disproportionate to the benefits it attempts to confer on those seeking more expedient access to MAID.”
The Catholic Bishops of Canada “remain steadfastly opposed to Bill C-7”.
Just to show that I am not completely one-sided on this, I will read something from the Canadian Unitarian Council, which is in favour of MAID. It said that:
During this time of the pandemic, our health care systems are burdened and stretched. We urge the government to find ways to provide the resources needed to make sure that those who want to access medical assistance in dying are able to do so, especially for those living in remote and under-resourced communities.
It sounds an awful lot like this is a solution to an overburdened medical system. Fifty-plus religious leaders in Canada penned an article, and I will read a brief portion of that. It says:
With our world-renowned health care system now endorsing euthanasia as a “solution” to human suffering, we will be undermining the creativity and resolve that is needed to confront some of the most complex cases of care. We are, in effect, imposing the intentional taking of human life as a solution to human suffering.... How precipitous a fall we have made into a moral abyss. This is not what we, as Canadians, have in mind when thinking of ourselves as a caring, compassionate and inclusive society. Instead, we must embrace those who suffer, and offer exceptional care to those who are confronting illness and death.
I also received a lot of correspondence from people in my riding, and I want to read some of those.
Cecile Goodmanson wrote:
Bill C-7 is a horrible law and I am asking you to oppose it. It is basically a suicide pact....Under Bill C-7, we as a society are saying that it is okay to kill sick, disabled, lonely and mentally ill people. If those people feel like life is not worth living, we should go along with that lie and dispense with them post-haste.... This is ridiculous. I thought we were not supposed to discriminate against the disabled, the elderly and those who are sick or mentally ill.
Becky Thomas wrote:
The new Liberal government Bill C-7 to expand assisted suicide and euthanasia is truly horrifying. It would allow people who are not even dying to be able to demand that a doctor help kill them. Anyone will be able to demand the state and taxpayer participation in their execution provided they claim they have intolerable psychological suffering or physical suffering, terms that are very broad and open to every interpretation one could imagine.... Please speak out against this push.
Pat and Donna Robol wrote this to the justice minister, and I am not sure that he read it so I will read it so that he can hear it. They wrote:
As someone opposed to physician-assisted suicide, we did complete the questionnaire; however, found the online survey very difficult to complete, because it was formed on a basis of presupposed agreement with euthanasia and assisted suicide. It did not give those of us opposed a proper voice. I heard over the course of a couple of weeks of many who, in conscience, felt they could not participate in such a survey for that very reason. This survey was flawed in so many ways, including the time allotted and the assumption everyone had access to computers.
David Dombrowski wrote:
I am very concerned that the Liberal government is not doing the promised five-year review of their Liberal euthanasia law but instead liberalizing it well beyond the court ruling that prompted the government's response.... This government has not charged anyone or even decided to investigate any of the several publicized cases of abuse under the existing euthanasia law, and now it proposes to remove many of those existing safeguards.
Cheryl Fraess wrote:
The Government of Canada prides itself on championing inclusion and accessibility. With its current position on the reintroduction of MAID, the government reminds us that it has a glaring blind spot when it comes to its vision of a more inclusive Canada. This is not simply an unfortunate omission. It is a betrayal of the foundational principles of inclusion, one that puts the lives of people with disability at risk.
As I conclude, I want to mention a few men who have gone before me.
My Uncle George was born around 1940. He had Down syndrome. He was my father's next oldest brother. My father would say that he did not even know that his brother had Down syndrome until my father was eight or nine years old. My Uncle George died naturally at age 53. My Uncle Ken suffered a horrific farm accident when he was four years old and became a paraplegic. His life was very difficult in those days, especially for his parents in dealing with a newly paraplegic son, but he persevered. He had a successful career with the provincial government, and became a very senior bureaucrat. I looked up to him, and he was by far my favourite uncle. He died of cancer in his fifties. I am who I am today, in part, because of these two men. I stand on the shoulders of these two men. Without words, they taught me tolerance, acceptance and love, and I am here today, in part, because of those two men.
Let us not create a Canada where men like Uncle George and Uncle Ken are erased from existence. Let us slow this down.
