Certainly there is renewed attention, as you said, on the importance of palliative care, and it was indeed positioned, by both the Supreme Court and in the Bill C-14 legislation, as something that could alleviate suffering that might lead to a request for hastened death. We were so fortunate to have supported, through the Canadian Society of Palliative Care Physicians, Bill C-277, which created the national framework for palliative care. What that really allowed us to do was to put together all the good work that's been done across the country, informed by international standards, to solidify what we need to achieve in Canada to make palliative care a reality.
Unfortunately, we haven't really done anything further than to put a framework on paper. What we need is the money and the infrastructure to get the boots on the ground. We now have clearly defined national competencies for all professionals who provide a palliative approach to care for their patients and for the specialist training that is needed, but they are not embedded into curricula across the country. We do not have quality standards to evaluate what palliative care is happening across the country. That goes back to the Health Canada data. We just don't know what's happening and who's providing the care, although now we have these credentialing programs.
We need a national system that's linked to Accreditation Canada's standards and that's administered so that provinces collect data on outcomes for patients that is patient-reported. We also need the quality standards to make sure that provinces are accountable for improving both the quality of palliative care and the access to it. Achieving that will take a sustained investment of resources over time to get those trainings embedded, to get the standards up and to hold the provinces accountable through accreditation standards. That's absolutely needed, and we haven't seen any of that. There was no money in the last federal budget, and that needs to change. At least 95% of Canadians don't want to die via an assisted death, so let's put some money into supporting the needs of all those people who don't want MAID.