Mr. Speaker, last Friday I was in my riding office when I received a call from a lady in the hospital who wanted to see me. She said she was no longer able to get around, so I went to her hospital room and spent some 30 minutes with her. This lady is 50 years old and has multiple sclerosis. She can no longer use her limbs, is immobilized, and in great pain. She told me she has to use ice when she goes to bed at night to reduce the pain her body is in. She has been in this state in hospital for over a year. Her mind is perfectly clear, she is a most intelligent woman with whom I had an extraordinary conversation. She is on morphine and the dose is increased from time to time, enough to keep her alive but perhaps not enough to fully do away with her suffering. She says she is still in pain. I saw her in her wheelchair beside the bed, virtually unable to move any more.
I told her we were soon going to be discussing euthanasia in the House. I asked her how we politicians could differentiate between cases where life is truly unbearable, with no hope of cure, and other cases. I would not want to see it apply to a widow of 75 who no longer wants to live because her husband died two years before. That is not its purpose. So I asked her how we would differentiate and she said perhaps to have two criteria: a degenerative disease with no possibility of remission, and unbearable suffering. She said that these both applied to her and she had really no hope left in her life.
This is what I wonder, and what I would ask the hon. member. Are the criteria she proposes sufficient to properly delineate this so that there is no danger of its becoming too broad at some point?