Mr. Speaker, my colleague in the Liberal Party, possibly the member for Winnipeg Centre but I am not sure, made a comment the other day, that in the first nations tradition, they always take into consideration how the decision they make today will impact seven generations from now. I thought there was a lot of wisdom in that perspective. Often we look at a decision and we make it lightly without thinking about the long-term consequences. Each of us in this room has made the mistake of making a short-term decision without adequately considering the long-term consequences.
I am very concerned about where we are going with this bill. Many of my colleagues, on both sides of the House, have given illustrations from other jurisdictions that have implemented a regime similar to the one we are considering, in fact in some cases more restrictive than the one we are considering. Yet over time, those jurisdictions have seen an incredible widening of the door, while thinking at first they had adequate safeguards, and in a very short time moving from a smaller number of people accessing physician-assisted suicide to an increase within a period of 15 years, for example, in Belgium I believe, it went from 330 to over 2,200 last year.
If we are to extrapolate those numbers to Canada with a population of three times that of Belgium, we are looking at potentially over 6,000 Canadians dying by physician-assisted suicide in one year. In my opinion, that would be a national tragedy.