Mr. Speaker, I am grateful for the opportunity to rise today in the House to support my colleague's hard work on Bill C-277, an act providing for the development of a framework on palliative care in Canada. We are in a time where Canada is seeing an aging population, and it is our role as parliamentarians to help prepare our economy and our health care system for the coming decades.
First, it is important to understand what exactly palliative care is. For someone who has a life-threatening condition or a serious illness, palliative care is used to help improve the overall quality of life, reduce and/or relieve any physical and psychological symptoms, help individuals have a more peaceful and dignified death, and provide support to families and friends while an individual is dying and afterwards.
Palliative care can be provided in a variety of settings. It is really dependent on the options and availabilities within a community. Palliative care is provided at hospitals, individuals' homes, long-term facilities, and hospices.
The bill ensures that all Canadians have a real choice in regard to their end-of-life plans, something that is extremely important now that physician-assisted dying is legal. The Supreme Court itself stated that a request for physician-assisted death cannot be truly voluntary if the option of proper palliative care is not available to alleviate a person's suffering.
As I've said in previous speeches, assisted suicide should only be made available on the rarest of occasions. Canadians expect and deserve a choice between quality palliative care and assisted death. The government has already committed to one of those, and it is now time for it to commit to the importance of high-quality palliative care in Canada.
We know that all parties are in favour of palliative care for Canadians, but we must ensure that all parties agree that the bill is in fact needed in Canada.
I will not lie, I do have some concerns about the current government's agenda when it comes to palliative care. The Liberals started off with promising all Canadians an immediate $3-billion injection for home care, including palliative care, but now the Liberals have changed course. The Liberals are using the urgency of palliative care in communities as a bargaining tool, and that, in my opinion, is absolutely offensive. The provinces that have agreed to the Liberals' terms when renegotiating the health accord were given funding for both mental health and home care, while others that have not yet agreed to the Liberals' terms have received absolutely nothing.
Again we see a lot of talk on home care specifically. I am not saying that home care should not be incorporated in the promised new funding, but to completely eliminate palliative care from the promised funding would be irresponsible.
The government must assure Canadians that there will in fact be some designation of money to palliative care. As I already said, the need for palliative care services is increasing. Currently, only 30% of Canadians have access to good quality palliative care and this is problematic. We must ensure that the government properly allocates some of the promised investment into palliative care, and ensure that this bill be supported by everyone.
Bill C-277 will ensure that action is taken to define services that would be covered. It would introduce a standard training requirement for various levels of care providers, and it would help to collect the necessary data to ensure palliative care is successful in Canada.
There is no reason for any party to oppose such a well-thought-out bill that has the support of so many stakeholders across the country including the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Cancer Society, the Canadian Nurses Association, the Canadian Society of Palliative Care Physicians, Pallium Canada, ARPA, the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association, the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the Kidney Foundation, the ALS Society, the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists, and the more than 50 organization members of the quality care coalition.
It is by working hard with organizations and bringing awareness to the need for palliative care that we can make a difference and ensure that individuals at the end of their lives are under the best possible care. This allows families to feel comforted and individuals to die with dignity.
In my riding of Oshawa, there is a wonderful individual by the name of Dr. Gillian Gilchrist. Dr. Gilchrist worked at the Oshawa General Hospital as the medical director of the palliative care team. She was the driving force behind the first palliative care unit at Oshawa General Hospital in 1981, and is considered a pioneer in providing palliative care within our community and raising awareness of the need for end-of-life care.
Dr. Gilchrist, along with her team, were on call 24-7, over all of Durham region.
Today, Lakeridge Health, which the Oshawa General Hospital has become a part of, and Queen's University, have partnered to create the first academic chair in palliative care. This chair will be named after Dr. Gillian Gilchrist. The idea is to ensure that we continue to focus on important areas within palliative care and be able to improve how future patients receive the best end-of-life care possible. According to Dr. Gilchrist, there is a lot that proper palliative care can do for an individual who is at the end of his or her life. lt provides patients and loved ones with the necessary support through a difficult time, not just physical support but emotional support as well.
Proper palliative care cannot be done without a team or proper training. This is why we must support this bill to ensure that the proper resources are there for Canadians when we need them. Experts themselves have said that if given the choice of good palliative care or to end one's own life, 95% of patients would choose to live.
As Dr. Richard Reznick, dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Queen's University, said, “We have no desire to treat tomorrow's patients the way we're treating today's. We [must] treat them better.”
In conclusion, we must treat those people better. Many of the people requiring palliative care are seniors or veterans. Seniors built our communities, developed our businesses, and supported our economy. Seniors built this great country, fought in our wars, raised their kids, and ultimately created this prosperous country that we are all so fortunate to live in. It is our responsibility to ensure that the most vulnerable are taken care of. When these individuals, who have done so much for us, need the most support, it is Canada's turn to support them. It is our job to make them comfortable. This is why I will support this important bill. I encourage all members of the House to do the same. I want to thank my colleague for all of the good work she has done bringing this issue forward.