Thank you to the witnesses for taking your valuable time to be with us today.
As I'm sure you're aware, we just had our first vote on Bill C-14. From your comments, I would assume that everybody would be voting against it. Maybe, maybe not, but I don't see anybody who has expressed total satisfaction.
I'm going to assume that if there is support, it's conditional upon amendments. It took Quebec six years and three premiers to pass their legislation, but we're going to do this within just weeks. I'm concerned about the rush-rush, and I wish we had more time to do this properly.
I believe it was Mr. Clemenger who made a comment about the importance of conscience protection. Bill C-14, as we've heard from the minister, does not compel or require a physician, a medical practitioner, a nurse practitioner, or a pharmacist, to participate in assisted suicide against their will. They're not compelled to do so. Yet there are hints that it would be the college of physicians and surgeons within each province that would determine whether a person were required to have an effective referral or not, which some physicians would find objectionable.
I met with an internist, who is now retired but was a doctor who practised medicine in British Columbia, who gave me a long list of examples in which there had been error in the continual care of a patient—people who were misdiagnosed and not treated properly and who ended up dying because of the lack of proper care. I asked, “Is this human error?”, and he said no, it was not. It was negligence in each of the cases that he gave to me. He said, “I'm not here to talk about conscience or the morality of this, just the practical way of dealing with it.”
There are problems in the regime being proposed, but I want to focus on conscience protection. The Canadian Medical Association said that 70% of physicians in Canada do not want to participate or refer in assisted dying. The other 30%, or 23,000 physicians, would be adequate to provide access. Why do you believe there's a push to the effect that the 70% are not protected—not compelled or required, but not protected...? Why is it so important to have conscience protection included in Bill C-14, or should Bill C-14 be amended at a future date?