Madam Speaker, again, we have an aging population in the country. More and more people are living longer. Health and medicine, as well as many other things, are prolonging life.
We need to be aware of that, and we need to ask what it will look like 10 years down the road. We need to start having a stronger commitment, right now, toward palliative care so when decisions like this need to be made people have an alternative. To be quite frank, if I had seen a line item in a budget that said that because of the Carter decision, the government would now focus on palliative care, I would have applauded that.
In the last government, we started consultations on palliative care. In fact, the Leader of the Opposition, who was health minister at the time, started consultations on Alzheimer's patients, palliative care, and long-term care. Again, we were looking forward to this type of debate.
Obviously on all sides, as we live out our lives, we want to know that the end is going to be lived as comfortably and compassionately as a society like ours should be providing.