Mr. Speaker, today I am pleased to present my maiden speech to advocate on behalf of those who cannot advocate for themselves. It is truly a privilege to be a voice for them. Some of them will even be voices from beyond the grave.
I call on my colleagues today to truly stop a moment and hear the cri de coeur from those who are still among us and from those calling to use from the next life. They should take a moment to listen to what we here in the House have done to destroy the value of their lives, to exclude them from society and to encourage them to exit the stage rather than wait for the curtain to fall once the final act is finished.
I will begin by introducing members to Roger Foley. As a young man, Roger was a musician and creator. He loved life, and it showed. However, in his early thirties, Roger was diagnosed with cerebellar ataxia, a debilitating disease that has stolen away his physical abilities one function at a time. Roger is now completely reliant on care providers for every necessity of life.
In the summer of 2018, after almost dying from a life-threatening case of food poisoning he contracted in long-term care, Roger was trying desperately to access funding for patient-directed care to hire and train his own consistent caregiver in his own home, as opposed to living in a hospital or in long-term care with rotating staff who do not understand his specific care needs. Members may remember Roger as the man who recorded his caregivers offering him euthanasia as an easy way out of his suffering. As we heard in the recording, the nurse says, “You don’t have to do it in some dramatic manner. You can apply for assisted—you know.” The nurse could not even bring himself to utter the word “euthanasia”, yet there he was, against Canadian law and all moral and ethical standards, offering a desperate man an easy way out. It was problem solved. However, Roger is a fighter, and even though he was overwhelmingly desperate, Roger decided he wanted to fight this injustice on behalf of himself and all our vulnerable brothers and sisters.
Roger's path intersected with mine early this year at the beginning of my time on the health committee. In preparation for a study on palliative care in Canada and a review of the euthanasia regime, issues that I thought would soon be on the table for discussion, I reached out to him and his lawyer for his perspective as someone within the system. I finally had a chance to speak via telephone with Roger while he was in Victoria Hospital in a private ward getting good care. While not in his preferred setting of his own home, I found him to be very open and engaging. His knowledge of the issue of euthanasia and the danger it posed for the vulnerable was enlightening. Just before we hung up that night, I said to Roger, “I wish you were on the committee because you are so much more equipped to speak to this issue than I am,” and we agreed to speak again soon.
Then COVID-19 hit, and Roger Foley's world changed completely. Roger was repeatedly transferred between units where there was little room for lift equipment and insufficient staffing for his specialized care. Living at the mercy of care attendants who are pressed for time was agonizingly difficult. Roger has very little in his life that is in his own control, but one thing he can do is swallow when offered food, with a certain technique. His head needs to be tipped at just the right angle, and the spoon needs to be offered in just the right way. For Roger, the ability to swallow affords him a feeling of independence. It may seem like a little thing to us, but to Roger it means a whole lot.
When the hospital wanted to feed him with a feeding tube to minimize the care hours required, his mental health took a turn for the worse. On May 15, Roger's brother filed a complaint with the ombudsman on Roger's behalf, yet things just got worse. Roger was suddenly informed that he would be transferred to the long-term care facility that had led to his original food poisoning and hospitalization. Understandably, Roger refused the transfer, begging instead, if not allowed self-directed care, to go back to his original unit, where staff knew him and his needs well. The hospital ignored his request, insisting that it was not safe for him because of COVID and that he needed to transfer.
The night before the transfer was to take place, Roger became completely desperate. He had not been sleeping, due to his fear and anxiety of being transferred. He became so distressed that he told his caregivers that he would throw himself off the gurney if they tried to transfer him the following morning. With no hope of help in sight, Roger reached out to his brother. His brother reached out to his lawyer. His lawyer reached out to me.
That evening we spent three hours on a conference call with Roger, encouraging him to be positive, to keep up the faith and to stay the course on behalf of those in the disabled community who would not have his strength and courage. All the while, I was attempting to contact the hospital administrators on another phone to beg them to back down and to warn them that Roger was possibly suicidal and needed them to reconsider for his mental health's sake.
Suddenly, I could hear on the phone in the room with Roger a new voice. The voice introduced herself as the hospital's mental health personnel, there to administer the 10-question suicide checklist on Roger. She began with her first question, attempting to gauge his distress level. Roger told her that he had no intention of answering her questions, since it was her and her bosses' fault he was in so much distress. She tried over and over, and he refused until she finally left the room in a huff.
The House heard me right; the mental health professional was so annoyed that Roger refused to answer her suicide checklist, she left the room and never returned. I was absolutely dumbfounded on the other side of the line, sitting helpless in my office in Langley. All these able-bodied health care professionals were able to leave the room freely. Everyone could could leave as they pleased, except Roger. Roger was trapped.
When we finally got some assurances that a trusted doctor would come and talk to Roger, and it encouraged him to try to rest, I hung up the phone, I had no idea what was going to happen in the morning. I was helpless, but not nearly as helpless as Roger. I can tell members that it was with great relief in the morning that Roger had indeed received an intervention through a trusted doctor and was getting proper care and nutrition. However, this event was a life changer for me. It dawned on me that without the help of his lawyer, who stayed on the phone with us the entire time, Roger's story may have ended quite differently. I wondered how many others in the country are at risk under this new MAID regime. How many vulnerable disabled are offered euthanasia when they are at their weakest? I made it my mission to find out.
What did I find out? I found out that Roger's case is by no means an isolated case. We can see this sort of abuse happening across the country. Take, for example, Jonathan Marchand: 43 years old, suffering from muscular dystrophy and living confined to bed in a nursing home in Quebec. He produced a video from his hospital room which he released on YouTube in response to living in long-term care during the pandemic. Jonathan states “Increasingly, euthanasia is offered as a solution to institutionalization. The idea is if you don't want to go into a long-term facility and die a slow death, then we are going to help you kill yourself. And those ideas are based on false assumptions about people with disabilities - like our lives are not worth living, that it's better to be dead than to have a disability - but it's not true!” He says that he decided that he would not go ahead with euthanasia, but would fight to get out of that place. Jonathan said, “In a world where there will be no empathy for people who need more help, it would be terrible. It would be something out of the nightmare of the Third Reich.”
Bill C-7 is an absolute nightmare that is facing disabled Canadians. Many are already afraid to go to hospital for fear they will be treated differently from the able-bodied. With the implementation of MAID in 2015, the community braced itself for the slippery slope ahead. Everyone said they were just overreacting. They said that safeguards were in place and euthanasia was meant to be safe and rare. We jump to 2020, and here we are racing down the hill at breakneck speed. In consultation with the disabled community, they have expressed firm opposition to this bill.
They explain that with the wording of Bill C-7, the Liberal government is proposing to set up two lines. Line one is for the able-bodied, who, in times of extreme distress, will be offered suicide prevention. Line two is for the disabled, who, in moments of weakness that they all endure as life ebbs and flows, will be offered assisted suicide, because their lives are not worth living, they are told. Add to all that the fact that current safeguards have already been proven completely ineffective. There is a complete lack of accountability structures to ensure abuses do not occur, and yet we are being asked to loosen restrictions even more. Where is the palliative care that was promised? Where is the review that was supposed to have happened? What are the Liberals afraid of finding out? Is it that in actual fact MAID has led to coercive deaths across our country, which go on undetected daily?
I stand here on behalf of all those who cry out for compassion and dignity as they travel a very tough road filled with complex care needs and physical ailments that require far more from us as a society. I stand here as the voice of Roger in Toronto, Jonathan in Quebec, Raymond Bourbonnais, Candice Lewis, Sean Tagert, Archie Rolland and so many more who we may never know.
“Lean on me.” That is what I want all of us to say here in this House—