Thank you for that question. I'm just reflecting on it as an individual.
I work in Ontario, which is a complicated province. There are lots of different health care systems there. I think there is still work to be done at a local level to ensure that the entire system has created a coordinated point of access.
The encouraging thing is that where I am, there is now a provincial group looking at a community of practice around medical assistance in dying, particularly for a mental disorder. In Toronto, where I work, we now have a coordinated working group sponsored by the two local Toronto hospitals, which, again, is turning its mind to how to do this. It is represented by a number of different health professionals and includes psychiatry. In fact, the Toronto working group is co-chaired by two psychiatrists.
I think people are working hard knowing that there is a date in mind to get to a place of readiness and knowing that readiness is never going to be perfect. When we think about readiness in this context compared to when MAID came out way back with Bill C-14, there's been a lot more work done on the national approach around standards and available curriculum, and I think many different organizations are engaging health care teams around how to best understand this.
I am definitely not a MAID expansionist. I just truly believe that it's very stigmatizing—and this is my personal belief—to take a group of patients and say to them, “You can't even be considered for something because you have a mental illness.”
I believe that very few people would be found eligible should this go ahead with respect to mental illness. Ms. Birenbaum has clearly outlined all of the safeguards and processes we'd have to get through to get to that point.
Those would be my personal reflections, not the CPA's reflections.