There are a number of reasons for that. For about the past 40 years or so, palliative care has been striving to show people that we do not hasten death and we do not shorten their life. The problem with combining it with MAID is that there is confusion. That's one of the reasons. That's actually supported by a 2021 study of public knowledge and attitudes concerning palliative care among Canadian people. They found that those who had a high perceived knowledge about palliative care were more likely to associate it with care provided as a last resort at the end of life. Despite 40 years of work, people were still associating palliative care with end of life, so combining MAID with palliative care would definitely cause that.
The other reason is that there are still people who have fears that palliative care somehow shortens life. I've certainly met people like that who have those fears, particularly with the so-called opioid crisis. Many people are fearful of using opioids, so we have to work hard with that, as we do not want it.
The other reason is that when MAID was first legalized, many health care providers, not understanding either palliative care or MAID, sort of thought palliative care would deal with this because it deals with all the end-of-life stuff. It was very chaotic, and our concern is that if we went back to that, for health care funders that would probably seem like the ideal thing because then everything would be kind of jammed together and you would have no extra funding. You would have two programs coexisting together, which would be cheaper. We do not feel as though that would provide quality care.
The other reason is that it's been our experience that in certain situations, providing MAID actually ends up consuming palliative care resources. As we've told you tonight, there are problems with accessing palliative care. We have the same human resource challenges—