Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Allow me to echo my colleagues in thanking each of our witnesses for offering their perspectives in helping guide our committee through this study.
Dr. Chung, I'd like to start with you. In your opening statement, I think you've echoed a lot of the concerns that this committee has heard with respect to advance requests—just the idea that your future self may not have the capacity or consent abilities of your younger self, especially as the disease progresses. We do know that the word “dementia” is a scary word for many people. There is a fair amount of stigma attached to it.
However, in our last meeting, we had the pleasure and the honour of welcoming a witness by the name of Sandra Demontigny. She is living with early-onset aggressive dementia. It's a genetic version. Her father had it. She has no illusions as to what the disease is going to be like for her. She was there with her father. She watched his “descent into hell”, as she put it, and she knows that's going to be her life as well.
How do you react to someone who has such an intimate familiarity with the disease, who understands what her condition is going to be like as it progresses, and who very much is expressing her personal autonomy right now, saying, “I do not want to end up like my father”? How do we wrestle with that as a committee?