I want to step in now and address the second point in our brief, which is advance requests for medical aid to die.
Bill C-14 ignores recommendation 7 of the special joint committee, which would permit advance requests for someone diagnosed with a condition likely to cause loss of competence—for example, Alzheimer's disease. The government is proposing instead an independent study of advance requests, and it may revisit the issue in five years when the bill is reviewed.
Here is our view.
Dementing diseases such as Alzheimer's are terminal. They kill vital brain cells slowly and cruelly. The course of the disease can last up to 20 years after a diagnosis. In the late stages of dementing diseases, the body is alive but the brain is compromised beyond repair. The person has become a shell, living in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability. It is a pitiable state to be in.
The idea of being demented deeply scares me. I would rather be dead than live the final stages of dementia. We've all heard someone say “Just shoot me” as they imagine themselves severely demented. We foresee the loss of quality in their future life. They foresee the quality of life in their future life, and they beg to be allowed to receive assistance to die if they have by then lost the capacity to make the request. We believe that a valid advance request that includes a specific, independently verifiable description of a future state so devoid of quality that life itself would be intolerable to the individual should survive its author's loss of capacity to request assistance to die.
Some will say this can't work because that person might change their mind, but we posit that when you lose the capacity to make an informed choice about your own body, then you also lose the capacity to change your mind, and your advance request should stand as the last expressed wishes of your competent self.
If my validly written and witnessed advance request describes a state of being so lacking in quality that it would be intolerable to me, and if my description of that state is sufficiently clear that my legal substitute decision-maker and two independent medical professionals can verify that my debilitation has reached the point that I so clearly described, then my advance request should satisfy legal requirements to allow me to receive assistance to die.
Our overall view comes down to this. Bill C-14 must put forward clear rules about who is eligible for assistance to die, but it must do this in a way that respects the autonomy of the individual, in consultation with medical professionals, to decide when suffering has become so intolerable that death is preferable. This can be done in real time, or it can be done in advance through a clear and valid advance request. We beg you not to abandon to a pitiable fate those Canadians who would take the time to draft an advance request for assistance to die should they at some point in the future lose the capacity to make an advance contemporaneous request.
Trust the people who elected you to represent them, and trust the medical profession.
Thank you.