Mr. Speaker, first, I say to my friend from Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke that I am sorry for the loss of his mother.
I want members to know that the bill would not do anything about that. It is a sad deficiency that I keep hearing about day after day in my office. People will not be allowed to determine, even if they have the very condition that they feared the most, dementia, Alzheimer's, and the like, what will happen at the end of their life.
We have the terrible situation, with real-world examples from British Columbia, where a person who worked all her life nursing people with dementia said, “I do not want that to happen to me, being spoon-fed and in diapers in an institution”. Contrary to her expressed wishes, this bill will do nothing to address that. That is the deficiency I hear most about in my riding as well.
Most Canadians asked for that. The polls are absolutely clear that the circumstance my colleague recounted is precisely what people fear, and this bill sadly will not do what the recommendation of the joint committee and others have urged us to do, namely, to provide in circumstances where people delineate precisely when it is time for that physician-assisted dying to take place. There will be no opportunity to do that. We can do better. We must do better.