Mr. Speaker, the government's euthanasia legislation was supposed to restrict the practice to a narrow set of cases, not simply to legalize death on demand. However, a physician's recent harrowing accounts of abuses of the euthanasia bill, just published in The Huffington Post, show very clearly that the safeguards in the law are not working.
In one of the cases recounted, a Vancouver physician declared a depressed person eligible for euthanasia even before examining that person, because the patient “could easily get bed sores and then die of infection”. A person's death was, prior to examination, declared reasonably foreseeable because the person could theoretically die from from an as-yet uncontracted bedsore infection. That is the reality of legal euthanasia right now in Canada: people who meet no credible criteria are doctor shopping and then finding someone who will sign off.
To mitigate these egregious cases we are already seeing, something as simple as better definitions would go a long way. In light of these emerging case reports, I call on the government to fix this alarming problem as soon as possible.