Thank you for that question.
As I said, I do not believe there are safeguards that can be put in place at this point that will address those issues without bringing back the reasonably foreseeable death criteria. We could certainly do a much better job of data collection and monitoring. We don't know how many people are in the circumstances that Heidi has described. That would be a minor step forward.
I think the issue is whether we can improve our disability support system enough. Can we take care of the issues of institutionalization? We've been saying we're doing that for 30 or 40 years now, and we're still not there. Obviously, the best-case solution is that we make those arrangements. The reality is...are we putting people's lives at risk while we're waiting for Nirvana?
There are 15,000-plus people of working age with disabilities in long-term care homes at the moment, most of whom do not want to be there. We see how long it's taking to deal with the Canada disability benefit. You seem to be able to move MAID changes along quite quickly, but it has already been a couple of years that the bill has been kicking around. We have another three years of study and we don't even know if it's going to be enough to begin to address the problem.
I don't mean to sound completely cynical, but I don't want to offer a set of safeguards that I don't think will do the job.
I'll pass it over to my colleagues now.