Yes, exactly, Madam Chair.
I'm sorry if I wasn't making the link clear enough, but the point I was making was that a person may sign to express their advance consent towards a particular point in time in the future. There are adaptations that may happen in their experience, but there are also adaptations that may happen in terms of their care. The data shows that there's not a sufficient supply of palliative care to support most Canadians. If a person, then, at that earlier point in time is not receiving palliative care, not being engaged with family, perhaps, or whatever their circumstances are, and they make an advance request, and then, at that point in time in the future, they are receiving care that they weren't expecting to receive....
I think just the idea of the advance consent provision as it's currently constructed assumes that people have a perfect ability to predict what their experience will be in their future and that their experiences will be sort of linear—that they can make an advance request for, say, February 20 knowing that they will go through a certain process and that they will feel a certain way at that point in time and that they will feel a certain way between now and then. Evidently that is not the case.
It's clear that's not going to be true for most of us in most circumstances, but it is particularly not true for a person as they're approaching the end of their life. We've had cases in the media in which a person has felt that they wanted to live through Christmas because that was something that was important to them, but it's also very possible that a person having been through that might identify other milestones and say that they'd actually like to extend their deadline for this, that or the other reason, and that just speaks to the importance of having as much of a connection to contemporaneous consent as possible, recognizing all of the different changes in circumstances and the dynamic ways in which people's circumstances vary over time. This is why we need to have safeguards of some kind, and this is, I think, a reasonable safeguard.
I want to identify that the amendment doesn't make this section perfect. I still have concerns about the mechanics of the advance consent provision, for reasons that are evident in the points that I have discussed. I do, though, think this shifts the purpose of advance consent to filling in for a case where contemporaneous consent is not at all possible, but it still requires some mechanism of consultation in the moment.
Madam Chair, I may want to say more on this, but I'll pause for now and we'll go to others.
Thanks.