Madam Speaker, I would like to start this evening by acknowledging the difficulty of this task. Certainly the Minister of Justice faces a very daunting one. It is clear that Canadians have varied beliefs and deeply held convictions when it comes to the issue that is before the House today. I appreciate that the justice minister has attempted to find a law that balances the autonomy of individuals and the rights and responsibilities of the Canadian community as a whole, while simultaneously protecting the vulnerable among us.
It has been said that a society can be judged by how it treats its weakest members. I believe that is true.
I have to confess that I have wrestled with this legislation and continue to do so today. It seems as though the Supreme Court of Canada, with the Carter decision, has forced us into an unending abyss of grey. I prefer clear lines. I like black and white wherever possible.
I believe that doctors exist to save lives, not take them, and I believe that we as a society should always contend for life and not against it. However, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled otherwise, and thereby robbed Canadians of clarity when it comes to this issue.
Assisted dying is now permitted in Canada, and we as parliamentarians have been tasked with the responsibility of putting legislation in place.
To that end, I would like to take a few minutes to share with the House and with the Canadian public my reflections on the proposed legislation. In particular, I would like to explore whether or not the rules and regulations within this legislation are adequate to protect the most vulnerable Canadians among us from being encouraged or pressured into pursuing assisted dying.
To be clear, this legislation is far better than what was recommended by the special joint committee, but there are still a number of things that cause me concern.
The first is a lack of access to quality palliative care within the nation of Canada. Right now, only 30% of Canadians have access to palliative care. Without access to all end-of-life options, a person cannot make a fully informed decision with regard to how they will face their death. Palliative care affirms that fighting to preserve life is our natural instinct and that dying is a part of our natural human experience.
Palliative care empowers a person to come to the end of his or her life with dignity intact and in a state of comfort. It deeply concerns me that we as a society are willing to invest significant dollars into assisted death before allocating adequate funds for palliative care. Why are we shifting to placing greater emphasis on death than on life?
Furthermore, I am concerned about those who acquire a disability during their life. In my role as the critic for persons with disabilities, I was able to consult with many organizations from across the country as well as organizations within my local constituency, and with a broad number of individuals who currently suffer from a disability. These personal stories helped to shape the concerns that I hold and will deliver today.
Without exception, every person who acquired a disability in their life told me that they experienced a period of intense depression as they adjusted to their new reality. For some, this period lasted days, and for others it lasted years. However, the hope they shared with me was that despite how different their life looked after they adjusted to their disability, they did regain purpose, joy, and dignity.
All of these individuals continue to face significant daily challenges. Quite a few of them rely on others for basic needs, such as eating or personal hygiene, and many even live with chronic pain. However, all of them have come to value the life that they lead and live with dignity, honour, and respect.
The message that these individuals brought forward to me was that in their previous lives they did not have a clue with regard to how it was possible to live with purpose and dignity while having a disability. This attitude took a while to discover, and they did so within the circumstances of their condition.
This is why I was pleased to see that the justice minister held her ground and did not allow for advance consent.
The Supreme Court, in many previous decisions, has defined the concept of continuous consent. We often hear about this in relation to sexual assault trials, but the principle is active in this case as well. Both the trial judge and the Supreme Court specifically limited assisted dying to a competent adult person who clearly consents to the termination of life. This consent needs to be given throughout the entire procedure. A previous declaration cannot fully appreciate how a person's understanding of his or her own condition changes as he or she learns to adapt to the new reality. Simply trusting someone's preconceived concept of what they will be like in the future is not a reliable mechanism for determining how they will actually be with their future condition.
I appreciated the reference from the minister to the need to protect vulnerable persons. The Supreme Court rightly found that the intent of the previous Criminal Code provisions was to protect vulnerable people from being induced to suicide. The Supreme Court validated this intent with its Carter decision. The unfortunate reality of people with disabilities and those with degenerative conditions is all too often one of poverty. In this circumstance, these individuals are entirely reliant on community access initiatives in order to live lives of dignity.
I have heard tragic stories of individuals who, with minimal community supports, such as adequate home care or assistance in transportation, could easily live a dignified existence. However, because these individuals were left in isolation and vulnerability, they wanted to access assisted suicide. They wanted to end the suffering that had nothing to do with their condition and everything to do with their social vulnerabilities. This is the harsh reality. Without strong safeguards in place, vulnerable people could be influenced to accept assisted dying because of non-medical social circumstances.
For this reason, all of the major organizations I have talked with from across Canada that work with persons with disabilities have called for a prior review by an expert to assess non-medical social vulnerabilities. This is not currently part of the legislation that is proposed. Something that I believe is absolutely essential to any legislative framework as we go forward is to have a prior review by someone with the expertise to determine if isolation, depression, burden, or poverty are impairing the ability of someone to make a competent decision with regard to assisted dying.
I commend the Liberal government for reintroducing into this debate the concept that physician-assisted dying must be connected with a condition that would lead to death. I appreciate this provision. As an alternate member of the Special Joint Committee on Physician-Assisted Dying, I saw a number of members of that committee from both the House of Commons and the other place argue that assisted dying should be offered to any individual who felt he or she was experiencing “enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual in the circumstances of his or her condition.”
The emphasis was on the perceived experience of the individual rather than a physical condition. There is no science to this approach, and no external diagnosis. If followed to its logical conclusion, this so-called criteria would allow anyone to access assisted dying without any accountability whatsoever. However, by tying assisted dying to an external medical diagnosis, it would move this process to something beyond the relative experience of the individual. This is critical to lessening the slippery slope that would inevitably exist with this legislation in place.
Every student who has taken an introductory class in politics would be familiar with the concept that laws are a social contract within Canada. When a law is struck down, it means that by extension every Canadian is in part affirming a previously banned behaviour that is now legal. It may not seem like a big distinction to limit assisted dying to conditions that reasonably could be expected to cause death, but it will in fact make a significant difference in the society we build going forward.
If we are a compassionate society that believes in protecting the vulnerable, it means that we believe society has the ability to overrule the impulses of the individual when we determine that those impulses would cause harm to the individual or harm to another person. This motive to save others is one of our redeeming characteristics as human beings. To allow this procedure to be accessed based on the subjective experience of individuals who feel they are in pain from a non-terminal condition would fundamentally alter the social fabric of our society. We are a society that contends for life. We must remain as that.
We as a Canadian society need to ensure that we do not tell those living with a disability, those who have to rely on others for the necessities of life, and those who face chronic pain with courage and determination, that their lives are not worth living. It is easy to lose sight of the broader implications to society when one focuses only on the post-modern concept of relative truth. Such an approach makes it impossible to argue with a suicidal person that his or her life is worth living. However, when we affirm objective truth, that is truth that remains true. Whether an individual believes it or not, it is so because we as a society have chosen to believe it.