Thank you, Madam Chair.
An individual's ability to access MAID does not hinge on this particular amendment. This amendment, as I understand it, is to fill the legislative vacuum that is being created with this legislation. If we asked every member of this committee and everyone participating today to define someone whose death is reasonably foreseeable, we could get 32 different answers because this legislation doesn't get the job done. It's not precise. It's our job, wherever we're able, to provide precise direction, especially on a piece of legislation that is literally dealing with life or death.
Bill C-7 opens up Canada's assisted dying regime. Originally, under C-14, someone's death had to be reasonably foreseeable. Bill C-7 says that, no, your death does not have to be reasonably foreseeable in order to access MAID. This means that someone who is not dying, as we may think of, someone who may have 10, 15, 20, 30 years to live, is eligible to receive MAID under Bill C-7.
It is incumbent upon us, I believe, to try to be a bit more precise. We've seen scenarios where someone is given six months to live, two years to live. That happens all the time. These are the calls that doctors make. I don't accept that saying 12 months is somehow making any more difficult a situation than just throwing something up against the wall, which is what we're doing with reasonable foreseeability—no one knows what that means. In a country of over 30 million people, with doctors in all of our provinces and territories with decisions that have to be made that are literally life and death, we're saying, “We don't know what to say. You guys figure it out.” We could have grave inconsistencies throughout the country when it comes to which track someone would be on with regard to assisted dying. There are different safeguards on different tracks, so it matters whether someone's death is reasonably foreseeable or not as to which track they fall into.
I think this is a reasonable amendment. I think it enables us to do our job as legislators to have a bit more precision—quite a bit more precision—in the legislation that we're dealing with. It's for that reason that I will be supporting this amendment to define “reasonably foreseeable” as 12 months. I listened to the testimony as members did, Madam Chair. I've seen some of the submissions. There is no definition of what reasonable foreseeability is, and that, in my view, is not acceptable. It's for those reasons that I will be supporting this amendment.
Thank you.