[Transcription of video presentation:]
I want to begin by acknowledging both the nature and the limits of what I bring today. I speak as someone who has moved through the world for seven decades with significant physical disability. I've spent a career analyzing that experience within the frameworks of law, policy and culture.
I want underscore that your work on this committee must be grounded in the authority of what the law calls “mental illness”, authority earned through neurodivergence, psychiatric survival, intersectional identity and mad scholarship. Seek out persons who have not only lived these realities, but worked them into deep understanding.
That's a different undertaking from finding individuals who will speak about their own desire for MAID. First-person accounts have a place here, but they are not a substitute for epistemic authority, and this committee must be clear about the difference.
Between 2021 and 2023, I was part of a working group on the MAID practitioner training curriculum. My full account is published this month in the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, and it's appended to my written testimony.
What I encountered there was a culture immune to the self-reflection and humility that ought to attend any decision to authorize death. My questions about whether a MAID applicant's despair arose from a life without validation or support were rejected as threats to autonomy. Vulnerability was narrowed to irrelevance. What remained in the curriculum trains assessors to, yes, verify capacity and consent but to look no further, as if the law’s demand for conscientious scrutiny had never existed.
In Carter v. Canada, Justice Smith staked this regime's legitimacy on trust in medical judgment—on physicians applying, in her words, the “very highest level” of scrutiny, the safety of their practice contingent upon “the skills and commitment of the physicians who are responsible”. I have watched that commitment up close in a curriculum designed to make practitioners look away. The trust that the court and Parliament placed in medical judgment has not been honoured.
On that evidence, this committee cannot responsibly contemplate expansion of a regime that has not learned to be accountable for the power it already wields.
Thank you.