Thank you, Madam Chair.
I would describe all three instances of evidence we heard this morning as ad hoc evidence, in every sense of the term. I think that since the beginning of the hearings on protecting persons with disabilities, all committee members were in agreement that more needed to be done for them.
I have frequently put forward the idea that impairment is individual and that disability is always, at the outset, social. It is accordingly clear that more must be done. Persons with disabilities experience discrimination and stigmatization. They don't have equal access to care and programs. It's difficult for them. That makes them victims once.
Further to what I've heard from the witnesses, it appears that you would like them to become victims a second time, this time of the state. In other words, at the most personal and private moment in life, after experiencing what they found to be beyond tolerable, that the state should deny them access to medical assistance in dying, thereby taking away their freedom to be able to decide for themselves what's acceptable to them in their own lives.
No one should be able to decide on someone else's quality of life. Only they themselves should be able to make that decision. By acting in this way, the state would be discriminating against them, making them victims for a second time.
Let's follow through on this line of argument. It says that the track one issue, meaning the foreseeable death criterion, should be strictly reintroduced. In keeping with the logic you described this morning, should these people also be denied the right to refuse care, even if that right is, from the ethical standpoint, considered to be a good medical practice? What would most likely happen is that these people would have no options other than refusing to eat, for example, which would lead to dehydration until they reach the point of imminent death, and when death is only a few hours away, to have medical assistance in dying administered. That has something to do with the distress you were talking about today.
Saying that the solution for people who are being discriminated against, and who do not have equal access to a full and meaningful life in society, is to take away their right to receive medical assistance in dying following an assessment, implies that their only option is suicide when their suffering becomes irreversibly intolerable.
Is it up to the state to decide what the tolerable threshold of suffering is for another human being?
Would anyone like to take this question? Ms. Grant?