Mr. Speaker, I have listened to the speeches today and I must admit that the arguments are seductive. I listened to the member for Burnaby-Kingsway say that very few people in Canada would require these mechanisms.
I have up to date research from a country that has practised euthanasia and assisted suicide. This study from the Netherlands is brand new research which I received last week. This discussion has engaged the Netherlands for some 20 years. Although it is not legal, for about 10 years in the Netherlands there have been no sanctions against euthanasia and assisted suicide, if certain criteria are met. These are the criteria that the Netherlands required for euthanasia or doctor assisted suicide to take place.
It must be voluntary. It must be a well informed, well considered request. There must be a persistent wish to die. There must be in the patient intolerable and hopeless suffering. The procedure requirements are such that another physician must be consulted so that not just one doctor is involved. Finally, a report of the case must be sent to the coroner's office. Those are the tight, nice strict criteria that doctors in the Netherlands must follow.
What has happened in Holland? I am going to be selective in the information I give here. The information is quite vast. About 2,000 people per year have been euthanized in the Netherlands following those criteria supposedly.
In the survey of the family physicians in this study it was found that 9 per cent of those individuals had on one or more occasions deliberately terminated the life of a patient without the patient's explicit request. Let us round out the figure to 10 per cent. About 200 people per year are euthanized in Holland, and I am being very specific, without the patient's consent.
One of the first criteria for euthanasia was that it must be voluntary, then well informed, then well considered, then a persistent wish to die, intolerable and hopeless suffering. For 200 people in Holland none of those things existed. A physician, by himself or herself, decided that the quality of life was no longer worth living. It is the only country in the world where there is this sort of experience.
I believe that the criteria were well meant, were well discussed, were well laid out and failed. The colleagues of mine in the Netherlands who debated this, set down very strict criteria. They failed. They flopped.
I am going to give two examples of how I think this path is the wrong path. The first one is from my own practice experience. I had a terminal cancer patient in hospital. She was suffering all the bad things at the end of life. She said to me in the evening: "Doctor, could you just give me something to end my suffering?" I said to her: "I anguish for you. I feel for you. My heart goes out to you. I think we might be able to find an alternative". I talked to the nurses on the station telling them my patient was really down. "We need to change her medication. We need to alter her treatment. Instead of giving her shots, we need to give her some
intravenous medication". We changed the palliation that I had been giving her. My palliation was not good enough.
I got the nurses to stay with her. She needed some personal support that night. Then I phoned her family and said: "Grandma is really, really tough tonight. Could anyone from the family please come and be with her. She needs some support". Things did settle down. The medication worked better and she was no longer suffering so badly and I went home. When I went back the next day to the hospital I found her sitting up, playing chess with her nephew. This was a different woman over this span of time.
The next day she said to me: "Dr. Hill, thank you so much for not listening to me two nights ago". From that I took it her plea to me was based more on depression and intolerable pain. The change I had made was a palliative change.
I will give another example that is much worse. It is from the Dutch experience. A doctor I know had a compatriot with an 85-year old patient with congestive heart failure, treatable only in a hospital and needing a shot of a medication called Lasix. She did not want to go to the hospital because, she said, they performed euthanasia on 85-year-olds in that place. The physician promised to look after her, so she agreed to go to the hospital.
She received her shot of Lasix which makes the kidneys more effective. She voided all this extra fluid in her lungs and felt much better the next day. It was a Friday and her physician was off duty. He had left to do the normal things a doctor does on weekends.
He returned on Monday to find that the covering physician whom he did not know well had needed a bed for a younger patient. He just went down the list and found the 85-year-old and determined that she was the least likely to live a worthwhile life. Members know the rest of the story. She was gone on Monday when he got there.
He will never be able to face what he did. He had promised her that she would be fine. The best intentions, the best safeguards and the best ideals did not work for that 85-year old individual. It was the wrong way to go.
I can quote my own constituents on the issue. I have polled them and it was fascinating. Thinking there would be a free vote on the issue I did a quick poll. I asked: "What do you think of doctor assisted suicide?" The poll came back with 55 per cent in agreement.
When it became obvious I had more time and it would not be a sudden thing, I polled my constituents in a much more specific way. I laid out the options of palliative care, the options that are available, and the switch in my constituents was dramatic. They no longer supported doctor assisted suicide when it was educationally explained to them.
My stand was very plain to them on both surveys. I am against doctor assisted suicide from my personal experiences and my view from international experience. It is the wrong way to go and I do not support any move toward doctor assisted suicide. I will do everything in my power while I am in the House to move down the road toward palliative care, the road toward care for those who are dying rather than snuffing them out.