Thank you, Senator Martin.
Unfortunately—and that was an add-on to the question Mr. MacGregor asked me earlier—while we haven't seen new investments in palliative care in terms of improving accessibility and being able to measure the quality of palliative care that's being referred to in the Health Canada reports, we have seen a loss of palliative care resources.
As I referred to in my brief remarks, and there are further details in my written brief, existing palliative care resources have been used to provide MAID. Palliative care funding in different provinces is being used to fund MAID programs, so we have less access to palliative care than we had before MAID was legalized.
We have clinicians who are now being asked to provide MAID. Lots of hospice palliative care nurses have now left their jobs because they are so demoralized by being unable to provide the palliative care that they went into their job for. It's been lumped into budgets with palliative and end-of-life care, and MAID is being funded out of existing palliative care dollars.
It is compromising already scarce resources for palliative care and, as I mentioned, some hospices have been forced to admit people just to provide the procedure of MAID, not to provide holistic palliative care. They are using this scarce palliative care resource, at the cost of other people who want palliative care and a natural death not being able to access it. We have had devastating impacts on palliative care in the last few years.