Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise for what will probably be my last time speaking to this particular bill, though I am sure not to this issue in general.
I am going to give a fairly disparate speech addressing a number of different issues that have been raised and loose ends in this conversation.
First, it is important to underline that we do not exist in a legislative vacuum at the present time. The government has, in my judgment, created this sort of artificial sense of fear, this artificial timeline that says we have to pass its bad legislation, in my judgment, just because if we do not do it, there will be no legislation.
June 6 has come and gone. There are provincial guidelines in place. I do not dispute the fact that a better version of a federal framework would have many desirable things about it. I have not certainly opposed the principle of the federal government legislating in this area. We are, after all, talking about the contours of an exception to the Criminal Code. However, in the absence of the federal government having done the detailed work, in terms of actually coming up with a system of checks and balances, a system of safeguards, it may well be—and in my view, it is the case with the present legislation—that we are better off to defeat it, perhaps to bring back a better bill in the future. I will talk specifically about why that is and what a better bill would look like.
However, I think it is fundamental that we recognize the reality that there is not a legislative vacuum. It is not as if people are being killed without some kinds of systems, checks and balances, and safeguards in place. Provinces were ready in a way that the federal government simply was not.
I think we have a failure of process here. I will just briefly outline what that process was.
We had a Supreme Court decision at a time when the Conservatives were in government. We created this expert panel to review and report back, and it would have reported back after the election. It would have been difficult for politicians to be involved in a government consultation process in the immediate lead-up to and during an election. However, we had this external expert panel that was consulting Canadians and that was ready to report back the results of its consultation, as well as make policy recommendations.
When the new government came in, it removed the power of that expert panel to make recommendations with respect to policy. It only reported on its consultation. When we hear the government talk about this timeline, somewhat misleadingly, it will say that the previous government did nothing to advance this, when it was its decision to remove that essential power of the expert panel to make policy recommendations.
Then we had a motion in this House, in December, to create a joint committee of the House and Senate to review this issue. That panel could have sat during the Christmas break, but it did not. It faced a time crunch when it came back. Then we waited months before seeing any kind of federal legislation. The failure of process was that in every case, in as much as a year and four months is not that much time, we faced a time crunch toward the activities of the committee and toward the activities of the House and certainly the Senate, because we did not more effectively use the panel that was put in place by the previous government. That panel consulted far beyond what the special committee did, far beyond what the justice committee did—in the case of the justice committee, not for any ill-intention, I am sure. I was concerned about the process of witness selection with the joint special committee. There were many people who were even intervenors in the Carter case who were not able to participate in those hearings. In any event, the point is that we had this artificial time crunch that was created, and we see it happening again today.
Again today, the government is trying to create this artificial urgency instead of delving into this substantive conversation. Quebec did this in six years. I am not saying we should, or could, take six years, but having the prudence to have introduced legislation earlier and to have drawn on the wisdom of the expert panel would have been much better because we are in this seeming time crunch. However, I think we need to reject the time crunch the government is creating and, instead, do the diligent work that we need to do to fix some of the big problems in the bill.
We see sloppiness in this legislation, especially around this discussion of reasonable foreseeability. The justice minister just spoke, and I actually share many of the concerns she raised about leaving this wide open, but I think what she neglects is that reasonable foreseeability is not clear enough to be, in any sense, a meaningful safeguard.
I have listened to the minister speak repeatedly about reasonable foreseeability, and I understand that in response to my short question, she did not have enough time to define it fully, even if she had wanted to. However, having listened to her speak many times on this subject, I am not at all clear—and maybe subsequent speeches will provide some clarity—what that term actually means.
Obviously, death is reasonably foreseeable for all of us. This is part of the human condition. We are born and we die. There was certainly nobody on either side of this debate who suggested that natural death is abnormal, bad, or something to be feared. It is a part of life and reasonably foreseeable for all of us. That does not mean that we should not be concerned, though, about policies that would artificially cut short the process of natural life and death.
However, if reasonably foreseeable is so important, then we should actually have a definition. There should be some clarity about what that means. Liberals have said they are not talking about imminent natural death, but at some point in the future. I have quipped before that, when I was learning to drive, my mother thought death was reasonably foreseeable every time we got in the car, but the central point is that death is reasonably foreseeable for all of us. It is part of the human condition.
Therefore, this is very sloppy. It is not a safeguard. We need real, meaningful safeguards. I suggest that the federal government should contemplate safeguards along the lines that the government of Manitoba has brought in, whereby some competent legal authority reviews cases to ensure that legal criteria were met, not a model of judicial review but government lawyers designated for this purpose.
Other provinces have put in place systems that necessarily involve the attending physician, or if the attending physician is a contentious objector, a different attending physician can assess the situation. However, it does not allow someone to just find any doctor anywhere who agrees that someone meets the criteria, but involves the physician or somebody actually involved in providing the person with care to make the assessment. If we look at what the provinces have already done in terms of safeguards, we see these are things that the federal government could adopt.
It is disappointing for me, frankly, as a member of Parliament, to see the government not doing the diligence that provinces have shown is possible when it comes to finding meaningful safeguards within a relatively compressed timeline. The government's approach has been to emphasize sort of an artificial timeline of urgency, but then not actually do the diligent work in advance. It created this time crunch by leaving it until the last minute and then said that it has to be passed or there is a legislative vacuum. There is no legislative vacuum, and again, the important work has not been done in terms of clarifying the safeguards.
I will make a general comment. I find myself repeatedly asking the government for definitions of things. On this issue and a range of other issues, it repeatedly uses words without actually clarifying what the words mean. It is true of the provisions of this bill, but more broadly, it is true of the underlying philosophy of this bill. So much of the motivating arguments for this legislation come from the concept of human dignity, human rights founded on an idea of human dignity. I think we would all agree that human rights have their foundation in human dignity. We give rights to people on the basis of what they are, intrinsically. Yet the government, in the context of talking about dying with dignity, has not told us what it means by dignity.
I believe in the idea of intrinsic human dignity. Dignity is present in all of us. I know that one member of the other place who was criticizing me in the media suggested that young people cannot understand this issue because they do not spend enough time in nursing homes. I have volunteered regularly in nursing homes for a very long time and, recently, my grandfather passed away in a care facility. It is important for me to believe, but more than that, to know, that he had dignity in spite of his suffering.
Many of us here have seen or been with people as they suffered and died. It is important that we know and believe that people, regardless of their circumstances, regardless of their suffering, have dignity.
Dignity is not conditional on circumstance. Dignity is intrinsic. If the government disagrees with that, if it has a different concept of human dignity, then it should at least define the term.
This work is sloppy, the philosophy is sloppy, the legislation is sloppy, and I encourage members to defeat this bill in every way possible.