Thank you for the question.
I'll be very blunt. Of course there needs to be better palliative care. There needs to be better access to palliative care.
I sometimes think we overstate the lack of palliative care. I was watching some of your panellists from earlier in the week, and I think sometimes the statistics that are used, if you check, are very outdated. My husband had excellent palliative care; so did my mother. The provinces have been working hard to improve this.
What we were seeing before our panel convened was that those who were opposed to the Supreme Court decision were saying we should not bring in physician-assisted dying in Canada until every Canadian has access to good quality palliative care. Of course, in our country, with a universal health care system, we will never have “Cadillac quality” access to anything. That's just the nature of the system. I personally didn't want that issue to get in the way of us moving forward.
I very strongly believe in a pan-Canadian approach to palliative care, but I also believe strongly that as we move toward that, we should not let people suffer in the meantime if they want to end their lives, end their suffering, when they meet the eligibility criteria in the Carter decision.