I won't talk about any particular cases, because there are still very low numbers of people from the track two coming forward, and even less in the circumstance you describe, though I'm sure it's not zero.
I think what we are starting to see, as I mentioned, are people coming forward who have expressed that their suffering is extreme and intolerable and the feeling of the clinician involved is that perhaps improved resources might alter that and improve and lessen their suffering if the resources were available.
That's not necessarily coming from the patient. It may be, and it may be that they've expressed that they haven't been able to access something, but it's coming from the people who are doing the work and the assessments and who are noticing that maybe this patient hasn't had access to a pain specialist, we'll say, because they live somewhere rural where there is no pain specialist.
The interesting dilemma is, what do we do in a situation when someone truly meets the criteria of eligibility for MAID but the clinician believes that maybe something more could be offered that's not actually reasonably available to that patient? That's causing distress in some of my colleagues, and we are not moving those cases forward, but we do ask that the government, federally and provincially, help to fix that situation and help make more robust the resources that can be made available.
We can't fix the health care system as clinicians, necessarily, and we certainly do not suggest that we curtail MAID in general, but we do think that you cannot hold individuals hostage to society's failings and the health care system's failings. That's just not fair. That is why we support the parallel development of resources—and adequate resources—at the same time that MAID is being developed and supported.