First, Mr. and Mrs. Schouten, I'd like to express my sincere condolences. I was deeply moved by your testimony.
I understand that you are probably still grieving, and hope that what you are experiencing now will ease your pain and help you through the mourning process.
There is a woman who, like you, testified before the committee recently. My colleague Mr. Cooper spoke about it. This was Ms. Caroline Marcoux, the mother of Charles Gignac. Her son was 17 years and nine months old when he died. He too had aggressive bone cancer. Two years to the day after the diagnosis, he died under palliative sedation in palliative care. He had fought the disease—he was tough—in all its phases, but never had any respite or remission and kept losing the battle.
In his memory, his mother decided to come and testify to tell us that free choice was important. For Charles, medical assistance in dying would have been his way of winning the war with the disease by preventing it from deciding when he was going to die. He wanted to choose the time to die peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones.
Before hearing your testimony, when I looked at the photographs of your son surrounded by his loved ones, I thought we might be about to hear something completely different from you. It's true that medical assistance in dying can also occur in a palliative care setting.
Mr. Liu's presentation got me thinking. I understand now that young people are just like adults, in that some are in favour of medical assistance in dying and others are against it. Isn't the role of the state precisely to guarantee the conditions needed to exercise free choice in such a personal human decision as one's own death and how it is to be experienced?