Madam Speaker, I listened closely to all of my colleagues.
Yesterday, I participated in the committee's hearings. This is my first opportunity to speak in the House.
I have just 10 minutes, but I would like to start by saying that everyone here is caring. Everyone is concerned about the well-being of people who are at the end of their lives, and everyone wants the best for them. However, just because we want to care does not necessary mean that we do what is best for people. We are not necessarily doing what is best for someone if we infringe on a person's autonomy and self-determination.
In the moral sense of the term, human dignity is connected to respect for self-determination. That should be the basis of our debate. Yesterday, in committee, I heard people say that we should consider a person's dignity in relation to their illness. They were talking about whether the person is wearing diapers, which is just frightening. Only that individual can make judgments about their own quality of life, and we cannot compare one life to another.
By way of introduction, since Bill C-14 is quite similar to part of the Quebec law, I would like to provide some context regarding the basis of that law. At the request of medical specialists and other civil society groups in Quebec, in the fall of 2009, the Quebec National Assembly created a deliberative space in order to give people the opportunity to express their views on an issue that could not be more personal: their own end of life.
From that moment on, the status quo was no longer an option for Quebec parliamentarians. Five years later, on June 5, 2014, the National Assembly passed Bill 52, The Act Respecting End-of-Life Care. One aspect of that act is medical assistance in dying.
This work was guided by two premises. First, my death, like my life, is my own. Second, the autonomy bestowed on a person by law through the principle of self-determination and its corollary rule of free and informed consent, which applies in biomedical contexts, is never questioned throughout that person's life, even in times of weakness or extreme emergency. Why then would things be any different at the end of a person's life?
Why would a person's right to self-determination be taken away because he or she is terminally ill? On what grounds would that be done? Is there any more personal and unique time in a person's life than the moment of death? What more could we wish than for a person to be able to calmly and peacefully pass on into death without any fear of suffering or any actual suffering? Is that not what we all hope for and what we would wish for any human being?
The consensus that was reached in Quebec was to make these premises part of a continuum of care, so that palliative care and euthanasia, two realities in the history of this issue, would no longer be set in opposition to each other. Why pit palliative care and euthanasia against each other? This question has been implicit in many of my Conservative colleague's speeches, because unlike in Quebec, we did not hold a debate on the right to die, which used to be associated with passive euthanasia.
People had to fight for the right to die. At the time, paternalistic doctors tended to focus on the curative aspect, and people were dying from the chemotherapy, not the cancer. Over the years, there has been a shift from passive euthanasia to palliative care. Human beings have thus acquired the right to die.
Palliative care is about taking a holistic approach to end-of-life care. This concept was developed by Cicely Saunders, in England, and dates back to 1967. Why should a request for assisted dying arising out of a positive experience of care near the end of one's life be considered a failure? The dying process has started and is irreversible.
A person might wake up one morning and decide that he or she is ready to give up. A person might also decide that that is not the case and that he or she wants to go on living, and die a slow death. The Quebec legislation in no way precludes one or the other, because it places end-of-life care in a continuum of care.
For more than 30 years, palliative care was considered the only way to die with dignity at the end of one's life. It became apparent that such care did not meet every need. Most requests for medical assistance in dying are made as part of the process of palliative care. Very rarely does a person who receives a terminal diagnosis from a doctor immediately request an injection. If so, it all depends on the stage of the cancer. The patient might be put on anti-depressants and told to get his or her affairs in order. There are things that a person needs to do before dying.
One of the difficulties with Bill C-14 is that it groups together two realities under medical assistance in dying. One is covered by Quebec, namely euthanasia and end-of-life care, which includes palliative care; the other is assisted suicide. This choice is causing the conceptual confusion that leads to the impasse in our debates.
Assisted suicide is not euthanasia. The difference is that a person can be at the terminal phase of a degenerative disease without being near death. A person can suffer tremendously without being in a situation of reasonably foreseeable natural death.
The Supreme Court has asked legislators to provide a framework for assisted suicide. This is what the Supreme Court told us in section 7:
Insofar as they prohibit physician-assisted dying for competent adults who seek such assistance as a result of a grievous and irremediable medical condition that causes enduring and intolerable suffering, ss. 241 (b) and 14 of the Criminal Code deprive these adults of their right to life, liberty and security of the person under s. 7 of the Charter. The right to life is engaged where the law or state action imposes death or an increased risk of death on a person, either directly or indirectly. Here, the prohibition deprives some individuals of life, as it has the effect of forcing some individuals to take their own lives prematurely, for fear that they would be incapable of doing so when they reached the point where suffering was intolerable.
That is what we have been asked to do, and that is what we need to figure out.