Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the privilege of appearing before the committee this evening.
I'm Françoise Hébert, chair of End of Life Planning Canada. Before retiring four years ago to become a full-time volunteer, I was the CEO of the Alzheimer Society of Toronto. We actually trained Chief Blair's staff on how to find the poor lost souls who got lost all the time.
My colleague, Nino Sekopet, is a psychotherapist. He is our client services manager. You may recognize him from the current issue of Maclean's magazine, which profiles him as Canada's leading assisted-death counsellor. Nino is the one to call if you want a safe and confidential place to talk about how to achieve a good death, and he is being swarmed by the media these days—his 15 minutes of fame.
End of Life Planning Canada regrets that Bill C-14 is creating certain limitations and conditions that will shut the door to the option of assisted dying for many Canadians who might otherwise meet the criteria set out in the Carter decision.
The Special Joint Committee on Physician-Assisted Dying got it largely right, in our view, and we hope that this committee will agree that strength and gumption are called for when regulating a Charter of Rights and Freedoms issue, even if this means going further than other jurisdictions have in dealing with such a fraught and deeply personal decision as to request assistance to die. Therefore, we beg each of you around this table, as the Supreme Court justices did so well, to imagine yourself with a grievous and irremediable medical condition that's causing you enduring suffering that is intolerable to you. That is the perspective that you need to legislate from.
I'm going to turn it over for three minutes to my colleague, the famous Nino Sekopet.