Mr. Speaker, I have had the honour of serving the people of Kitchener—Conestoga and being part of many important discussions and debates here in this chamber over the past 10 years. As members of Parliament, we are given the solemn obligation to chart the way forward for our great nation of Canada. The motions we table, the amendments we consider, the legislation we adopt will always impact, positively or negatively, the very people who elected us to represent them in the capital city of our nation, and they will also impact generations of Canadians to follow.
The impact of our deliberations and decisions we make on this critical life and death issue will impact the very fabric of our country. If I may say, it will leave a lasting legacy for good or for ill of our understanding of what it means to part of the human family.
Because of the very serious nature of the topic in front of us today, we, and by that I mean every member of this chamber, must take a step back and consider some very foundational questions. Each of us needs to ask ourselves these difficult questions. How we as members perceive these foundational issues is absolutely key to addressing this sobering topic before us today.
Consider with me for the next few moments these questions. What does it mean to be human? What gives human life meaning and value? Does every human life possess intrinsic value and dignity, regardless of perceived deformity, regardless of perceived disability, regardless of the perception of being a burden, regardless of whether or not a person may have achieved their best before date?
For me, the answer to all of these question is a resounding “yes”. Every human life is worthy of our utmost respect and protection. Every human life matters. Therefore, needless to say, I do not support physician-assisted suicide, or voluntary euthanasia or any legislation that would further devalue human life.
My world view is influenced by my life experiences, and most profoundly it has been shaped by my faith. I believe every human life has intrinsic value and dignity that needs to be held in high honour and esteemed, in other words, to be considered worthy.
There is a saying in the Talmud, “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”
On the Peace Tower of our Parliament buildings carved in stone above the west window, members will find these words taken from ancient Hebrew writings in the book of Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
What is our vision for Canada? I ask each of my colleagues today what their vision is for Canada.
My vision for Canada is one where every human life is valued and cherished from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death. It is my firm belief that life is a gift from God and that this gift is far too precious to be discarded or destroyed. Every human life is filled with infinite value and, yes, every person, regardless of disability, deformity, depression, or devaluation based on criteria of so-called “usefulness” has something to teach us about what it means to be human.
For those who are suffering, we have the privilege to come alongside and care deeply. We provide proper pain relief, palliative care, human touch and love, in other words, we provide compassion.
The very meaning of the word compassion is “to suffer with”. It is to come alongside and enter into the suffering, to come alongside with feeling and care. Compassion is supporting them. It is to ignore the fact that compassion has everything to do with relationships if we are to allow physician-assisted suicide. We simply cannot have compassion if the relationship has been intentionally terminated.
That being said, the Supreme Court of Canada has established grounds for an exemption from prosecution for physicians who would assist in administering the suicide dose or carry out the act of euthanasia. The Supreme Court of Canada has done this, completely rejecting the fact that the elected members of the House of Commons have rejected initiatives to legalize physician-assisted suicide on at least 15 occasions since 1991. Most recently, a bill to allow physician-assisted suicide was rejected in 2010 by a vote of 59 to 226. My contention is that it is not the job of the Supreme Court to create laws but rather to interpret them.
I was one of the members of Parliament who served on the joint committee appointed to study physician-assisted dying. Our committee heard from many witnesses representing many different viewpoints. We heard from medical professionals, palliative care experts, mental health professionals, the disability community, the aboriginal community, various faith communities, legal and constitutional experts, and ethicists. As members might expect, from such a large variety of people, there was a very diverse response.
The unfortunate reality is that the timeline given to our committee for the completion of our report and recommendations did not allow for the large number of groups who wanted to appear before this committee. Groups like the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, L'Arche Canada, Living with Dignity, as well as Dr. Balfour Mount, who is considered to be the father of palliative care in Canada and in fact in North America, were not allowed to appear at all.
The joint committee report had no teeth when it came to insisting that before physician-assisted suicide could be offered or even considered in Canada, there should at the very least be a credible offer of accessible and affordable palliative care to those who faced such a final solution of hastened death. Like the committee report, Bill C-14 fails miserably in stepping up with real change on this crucial issue.
Dr. Harvey Chochinov, chair of the external panel, professor of psychiatry at the University of Manitoba, and Canada research chair for palliative care, suggests that all patients requesting medical aid in dying would need to have a palliative care consultation to ensure that patients would be fully informed of all palliative care options that could be initiated in order to mitigate the suffering of patients. To ignore the very real lack of choice without a concurrent real offer of palliative care is to offer no choice, only hastened death.
I am thankful that Bill C-14 has incorporated many of the viewpoints of the dissenting report. However, it still includes very vague and subjective language and does not address many key issues raised by witnesses who appeared before the joint committee.
A major concern in this entire discussion has been the overt attempts to soften the language. Rather than call it physician-assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia, it was then referred to as physician-assisted dying. Even physicians objected vigorously to the term “physician-assisted dying”, especially palliative care physicians. For many decades these doctors have been assisting patients through the natural dying process.
It has been said that all social engineering is preceded by verbal engineering. We will find no better example of that verbal engineering than in the matter before us today. This topic is far too important to allow this vague and euphemistic language to go unchallenged. As Dr. Chochinov notes, Bill C-14 makes no distinction between physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, yet both are included in what the bill calls “medical assistance in dying”. It is extremely important to outline the difference, because international experience reveals that they are vastly different in terms of their uptake and lethality. In jurisdictions that offer only physician-assisted suicide, such as Oregon, these deaths account for about 0.3% of all deaths. In jurisdictions that offer euthanasia, hastened death accounts for approximately 3.0%, a tenfold increase.
If we were to extrapolate these figures to Canada where there are approximately 260,000 deaths per year, under a physician-assisted suicide regime, there would be approximately 780 deaths per year. However, if we were to extrapolate that to allow for euthanasia, the number of deaths would increase to 7,800 per year, which as I pointed out is a tenfold increase. The reason for the lower numbers under a physician-assisted suicide regime is ambivalence. It is crucial that at the very least the government needs to point out that if we are to proceed with this, we have to ask that those who request physician-assisted death must follow through on physician-assisted death rather than voluntary euthanasia because the numbers are so different.
Another key missing component is the matter of conscience protection for doctors and health care workers. If it is possible to ensure a “consistent approach to medical assistance in dying”, as the preamble asserts, there is no reason why at the same time a consistent approach to guarantee conscience rights cannot be included in Bill C-14.
Finally, Bill C-14 should include a system of judicial oversight in order to protect vulnerable persons. While two independent witnesses and two independent doctors sounds good on paper, the risks of overt or subtle coercion are too great and the possibility of abuse too real. These assertions need to be verified under a framework of legal oversight.
In summary, we should be offering hope to all Canadians. As legislators, we should be doing everything in our power to ensure that not one single person dies needlessly. It is with this in mind that I repeat the need for at least three major amendments to Bill C-14: first, vulnerable Canadians need better protection with a system of judicial oversight; second, doctors, health care personnel and institutions need clear conscience protection; and, finally, Canadians who are suffering need a real option of palliative care not hastened death.