Thank you very much, Mr. Garrison.
I am excited to talk about palliative care, because things are improving in that area. Budget 2017 committed $6 billion to the provinces and territories to ensure they could increase access to palliative care, something that is intertwined with this issue, as so many MPs have noted and as the minister himself has noted.
MAID does not exist in isolation outside of a palliative care framework. In fact, the majority of Canadians who have accessed MAID have utilized palliative care, some 82%. Even those who didn't access palliative care, the remaining 13% or so, had access to palliative care in most cases.
Is that to say we can't do more and we can't do better? To use an often repeated phrase, we can always do better. The provinces and territories, as you know, have largely the jurisdiction to improve health care services, but the federal government has been there all along to help improve access to palliative care, and will continue to do that.
When the physicians talked to us, they really felt this was not an either/or conversation. This was really about adding on, as Mr. Thériault pointed out, a certain degree of autonomy for people to decide at what point they wanted to die with circumstances they could control themselves, regardless of the situation of palliative care.
Palliative care, as we know, is a critically important component for people who are experiencing long-standing severe illness or approaching death, but in some cases people, even with palliative care, still want to end that suffering. That is the premise of this bill. It's based on dignity and choice, concerns we heard echoed by the practitioners who were so generous with their time to share their experiences with us.