Thank you, Madam Chair.
First, to facilitate the committee's work, we should agree on the use of terms. At present, we are using advance medical directives, or AMD, to refer to an advance request for medical aid in dying. Advance medical directives do not present a problem. They are part of agreed medical practices of refusing and stopping treatment. If we constantly confuse advance requests for medical assistance in dying and advance medical directives, it won't work, conceptually. We need to agree on this.
Dr. Pageau, in your defence, you didn't have a lot of time to explain your thinking. I understand there is an obligation to be very careful about various pitfalls such as ageism, for example. You seem to think that in its desire to facilitate access to medical assistance in dying or to extend it to certain situations, the state is operating on reasoning based in malice.
But when we violate a person's autonomy, their free will, their capacity to make their own decisions, their free choice, then, in my opinion, we are offending their dignity, as Kant meant it. You point out in other texts that death is not beautiful, it stinks. That has nothing to do with incontinence.
By definition, the health care system, the medical profession and health care workers must be benevolent. If they are malicious or harmful, they have to be got rid of, period. That is provided in the Criminal Code. We can't be benevolent, as a state, if we violate a person's autonomy. When a person is suffering from fatal dementia, in the name of what would the state have the right to define its threshold of what is tolerable? In your opinion, how is it more honourable and ethical?