Mr. Speaker, as the previous member for the Conservative Party did, I rise to speak to this bill as an individual member of the House. The NDP caucus has differing opinions on how to respond to Bill C-407.
My position is to oppose the bill. There is a need for debate on the issue of dying with dignity. The problem is the bill focuses the debate on only one area, an area that should be put off and discussed only as part of the larger debate when conclusions are reached on the issue of assisted suicide and only when that debate takes place and proper services are in place to deal with those people in our society who are unfortunate enough to be faced, at times, with the decision whether to end their lives on their own at a much earlier stage than they might otherwise have to.
The debate has been around assisted suicide. It has been highlighted by the Rodriguez case back in the early 1990s. However, it has been isolated to that area.
I think Windsor has the best hospice in the country. I talked with the director, the volunteers and the medical personnel. With very few exceptions, that entire community has been providing palliative care broadly based across the whole of the city and the county. They have told me that we can build a system that will dramatically reduce anyone having to make this decision. Our medical doctor, who is one of the leading pain control specialists in the country, has said that there are very few cases where medication cannot be used to control pain so it is tolerable and people do not have to make the choice of ending their life prematurely because they cannot end what might be otherwise intolerable pain.
So much of this is very personal to us, although we ultimately as legislators have to think in terms of what our responsibility is to set national policy. I think of a friend of mine. He was our law dean at law school and the president of the university. He ultimately died of Lou Gehrig's disease. I would like to be able to take some credit, although I was not directly involved, but his friends and family, his wife in particular, built a system around him. He struggled but he was determined to live absolutely as long as possible, and he did.
I am worried when I look at the bill. Through you, Mr. Speaker, to the member from La Pointe-de-l'Île, this is not only assisted suicide. As we heard from the parliamentary secretary, in some cases this moves over into euthanasia. Speaking as a lawyer, there is no doubt about that in my mind.
What we really need to do is build that system. About a month ago there was a conference in Gatineau. Caregivers in the system said that we had not built that. The government has some responsibility in this regard.
When we look at some of the provision in the Romanow report, it is quite clear that if we had expanded at a more rapid rate our home care system, our hospices, our palliative care, we would have dramatically reduced the need at any time for someone to have to make this decision.
Again I am going to be critical of the government. It was the NDP member from Sackville, Nova Scotia, who pushed for allowing people to take time away from work to care for loved ones. Rather than following his program, the government put very extremely restrictions on it. In fact, the government budgeted huge amounts of money and spent about 10% of it because it was so restricted that so few people could take advantage of it.
However, if the system were a good one, if it were well funded and did not have these restrictions, it would be part of the system that would prevent people from having to make of taking their own lives prematurely.
The member for La Pointe-de-l'Île spoke about the Netherlands and Oregon. I am worried about what has gone on in Oregon, to this extent. At the same time it brought legislation in, Oregon was prioritizing what benefits people could get. So much of what I think has gone on in Oregon is about minimizing the demands that ill people will put on its system. Canada is not about that.
We built the medicare system. We built our health care system on the basis that every Canadian would have access to it, including those who had terminal illnesses. We have failed them up to this point. I am quite convinced, again from my experience in my own community, that we could build a system that would allow every Canadian to die with dignity in their own time, in the natural course of events.
I am worried about the Netherlands. Two or three weeks ago, it introduced new amendments to its legislation that would allow custodians and guardians of children to make decisions. That again is not assisted suicide. That is not even euthanasia. That country has now moved, if it goes ahead with that legislation, to mercy killings. It gets into the Latimer situation that we and our courts faced. We found that we would not go to go down this road.
The ability of Canada to deal with this is quite clear. We have to assess and build a system that will recognize this. We will never allow for mercy killings. We will not allow for euthanasia. If we build that appropriate health care system, we might have those extreme, rare cases where we would allow for assisted suicide, but we are nowhere near that at this point. I leave myself open to be convinced that we have to do this at some point in the future, once that system is fully in place,
The risk we have is sending a message to the country that life is expendable, that we are prepared to say that we do not care enough for people to take care of them. Canada is not about that. Our health care system is not about that. We should never go down that route. That is what we risk if we adopt this bill.
I hear particularly from the Bloc that we should support the bill, that we need the debate and that we should send it to committee at second reading. On a personal level, I cannot do that and I do not believe members of the House should do that. By doing so, we accept in principle that we will allow for both assisted suicide and euthanasia. I am not prepared to cross that line and say to the country that we will start down that road.
I have a little story from Janet Napper, the executive director of the Hospice Association of Ontario. She describes going to a hospice shortly after she started working and talking to an elderly man. He specifically approached her to say that when he came to the hospice, he knew he was dying but he also knew that he would be treated as though he was not dying that he would be treated with respect. That gave him the courage to continue on.
That is the kind of system we have to have in Canada, not this bill.