Thank you very much, Chair.
This is such a difficult issue. Here we are, talking about the legality, what lawyers think, what caregivers think, what families feel and think. At the end of the day, this is all about that individual person who may or may not be trapped, as we heard from Dr. Poirier, in a place where they are no longer able to make these kinds of decisions because so many of their brain cells have died. We need to stop using legal language and using a whole bunch of lingo for what, in effect, is a subjective and very important decision.
I was very moved by Dr. Poirier's testimony when he basically said that his mother begged him during the very rare times she was lucid and said that she didn't want to continue. Yet she had caregivers whose own culture and morality said that she was happy and she should continue because she was being made comfortable by them. That is very sad. I can imagine what she must, in her lucid moments, have been thinking.
Advance requests and advance directives have a certain importance. When the person has cognitive function and is able to make decisions, I think they tell us what their morality is, what their own sense of self is. We learn things from them, and as Dr. Wiebe said, you know the patient over the long term; you know who they are. So when they get to a point where they're unable to make the kinds of decisions that they would have made, you know what that person believed in, what their morality was, what their values were, what they were thinking, how they valued certain things. Making that decision needs to be done on an ongoing, long-term basis.
This is a question. I'm not making a speech, but I'm seeing the conundrum that all of us face. To say that we can make a clear, legal statement that's going to make a decision to be for everybody doesn't make any sense. This is not a generic issue. It's based on the individual person and what you knew about them before they moved into the area where they are no longer in control or people are making decisions for them with regard to advance directives.
I think we need to start going back to what the Supreme Court originally said, which was that this is about subjective decision-making by an individual person, and that may differ with different people—