Thank you for both your questions. I'll answer them in the order you presented them.
On the issue of whether somebody could regain the will to live if they are qualifying for MAID for mental illness, the AMPQ, the Quebec association, wrote a paper supportive of expanding MAID for mental illness. One of the key authors was actually the chair of the current federal panel. Despite supporting MAID for mental illness, even in their position paper they acknowledge that “It is possible that a person who has recourse to MAID—regardless of his condition—could have regained the desire to live at some point in the future.” They then suggest that assessors will have to answer this ethical question each and every time they evaluate a request.
My point is that our law does not say grievous and irremediable conditions are determined by an ethical decision. It should be a scientific decision. On that there is no question that we cannot make those predictions in mental illness. CAMH and every other group that has looked at this, including the AMPQ, has said that.
In terms of the national apology piece, I think you're referring to the piece that I wrote in “The Conversation”. In terms of that, when you link all of this together, if we're not providing MAID for an irremediable condition, one we can predict in a person to be irremediable, then what are we providing it for? What we find we are providing it for is all sorts of other life suffering that is highly conflated with mental illness.
We are exposing marginalized, vulnerable people who actually could get better. We are providing them false, in my opinion, unscientific assessments claiming that they may have irremediability when no one can actually make that determination. Based on that, these marginalized individuals would receive MAID.
To me, that's something I think our country would need to issue an apology for at some point in the future.