Thank you so much.
As I get an opportunity to talk with clinicians, doctors and nurses across the country, all of them are trying to get this right and are deeply concerned about their patients. That's why I get so upset, because I think that, as parliamentarians, casting aspersions on people's motives and trying to insinuate that somehow anybody is not caring about human life is just deeply irresponsible.
In my experience, those who developed the national accredited MAID curriculum, those who developed the practice standards and those who are in the system are trying deeply to work with people who are in extraordinary pain. When a doctor has a patient who has been coming to them for decades in unspeakable pain and that doctor says, “I can't do anything for this patient; we've tried everything,” and that patient is asking for a way out, it is extraordinarily painful to hear that.
You could have an ideological position that you don't want to deal with that, but I think that understanding and navigating this and trying to work with the provinces and territories so they have appropriate safeguards, and looking at CAMH suggestions around clinical guidelines, are entirely appropriate, because we have to make sure that those safeguards are as strong as possible and that we are only dealing with those remote and most unusual of cases.