Madam Speaker, to bring folks up to speed as to where I left off, I was talking about the 10-day reflection period that would be removed from the medical assistant in dying legislation and how the current justice minister said that the 10-day waiting period added to the pain and suffering of people.
We know that is false. Modern medicine gives us the tools to alleviate pain and suffering, if only governments had the courage to make them widely available. It simply is not right or fair that people who are suffering may not have access to good palliative care, home care or to the medications they need to reduce their pain, suffering and anxiety. Ensuring all Canadians have access to care needs should be our top priority to address the needs of suffering Canadians. Death cannot and should not ever be the only choice to end excessive suffering.
Suffering Canadians must also be free to exercise a change of heart if they choose. The elimination of the reflection period and the removal of the requirement to reconfirm consent take away this option. It takes away the option to reconfirm consent. It takes away the option to give comfort in making that decision.
How are we preserving the right for people to change their minds when we waive the waiting period? It would seem the bill would make MAID not only final, but unwavering and resolute, because it would remove the waiting period and the need to reconfirm a person's consent.
The First Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada, 2019, published in July of this last year, relates that in 2019, 3.6% of the patients who made written requests for MAID subsequently withdrew those requests. That may seem like an insignificant number, but the number of deaths put in context works out to 263 deaths that were avoided because people changed their mind. Of the 7,336 who applied for medical assistance in dying, 263 people changed their mind, 3.6%.
We shut down economies for death rates of 0.2%. We now have what would be a wrongful death rate of 3.6% that could be averted and we turn a blind eye to it. Every single one of them deserved the freedom to make that choice. What if, on an annual basis, 263 people would reverse that decision based on having that 10-day waiting period? Now that 10-day waiting period is being removed.
Another primary concern I have is with respect to a glaring omission in the bill, which is the issue of conscience rights protections for medical professionals and health care workers as well as the rights of workers in hospices and other institutions not wanting to cause the death of people in their care.
As an editorial in Maclean's explains:
Many doctors are willing to expedite the natural process of dying, given their traditional role to relieve suffering. There is, however, a qualitative and ethical distinction between hastening a death which is already drawing near, and ending a life which is expected to persist.
This is a very valid point.
When one senator asked an expert witness whether it was true that medical professionals were leaving because of the lack of conscience rights, Dr. Herx replied, yes, that she knew of doctors who had taken early retirement for reasons of professional integrity or for their own moral compass.
Let us make no mistake. These are real lives, real people, real consciences being impacted by the decisions the House is making this week. Do we want to harden the hearts of those who, by their world view, cannot comply, those who by responding to MAID feel it is a betrayal of their professional commitment to save lives, a betrayal of their faith or their conscience?
Likewise, other professionals have concerns, for example, pastoral care and workers who attend to people who are suffering on a regular basis. They know they are not dealing with many of the root causes of pain, loneliness, fear, distress and despair.
With the revelation of the horrific conditions for our elderly, as described by the Canadian Armed Forces just recently when providing assistance to some personal care homes during this COVID crisis, the Canadian Council of Catholic Bishops asked how “in good conscience” could the criteria for MAID be expanded when we were not even responding to their basic human care?
The bill, if passed, has some very real life and death concerns. According to the Council of Canadian Academies, without its reasonably foreseeable natural death provision, which is being removed, Canada will become more permissive with respect to MAID than any other jurisdiction in the world.
Two other voices, Lemmens and Krakowitz Broker, explain that unlike any other country in the world, the new bill fails to explicitly require that all reasonable options be available and tried first before allowing physicians to end a patient's life.
Ensuring consent is so vital in avoiding any sense of coercive implication, subtle or otherwise, for the dignity of all lives. People just may change their minds. The Council of Canadian Academies advised that a major reason why people change their minds about MAID is the disability paradox, which is understood as healthy people imagining a future health condition and ending up discovering it has much more quality than anticipated. In other words, people may tend to overestimate the intolerability of a future health scenario.
An alarming suggestion made by the report is that people may have written their request under duress or coercion, fearing that a lack of social and health support created a bias to their future quality of life.
Expert opinions, speaking to the Senate committee on Bill C-7, discussed how, in the proposed bill, MAID would include treatable diseases where death was not imminent, which is where the bill adds a 90-day assessment period. However, it is no wonder that people with disabilities or chronic illnesses are feeling threatened by the legislation. This addition is especially concerning when people are faced with a sudden, dramatic, life-changing illness or disability, as it often takes much longer than three months to gain a renewed perspective of life after a diagnosis like that.
It is no wonder that former member of Parliament Jane Philpott and the current member for Vancouver Granville wrote an editorial for Maclean's, urging parliamentarians to proceed with caution, questioning whether there was enough medical and social evidence to even understand the implications of the potential changes being presented in the bill.