Madam Speaker, again, there is a bit of a conflation of a few issues here. The member spoke about eligibility criteria. There are eligibility criteria, there are safeguards to ensure that those eligibility criteria are actually being met in a considered way, and there is also a question of context. Do people have those alternatives?
For instance, if a person is suffering in a grievous and irremediable way because they have not had access to care that would address their suffering, they may meet the eligibility criteria. However, there is a problem there in terms of context, in the fact that they are making a decision based on limited options because the system has not provided them with the care that they want.
In terms of the safeguards, we have heard so much at the justice committee, and I encourage the member to look at the testimony from people with disabilities who talked about situations of being pressured and being told that they were selfish for not wanting to pursue this path. We have cases of pressure. Clearly, those are problems and, in principle, members would say that obviously that should not happen. However, the fact is that it is happening right now and the people who are involved in that pressure have not been prosecuted and have not been disciplined.
The government has held up that nobody has been prosecuted under this law so that means it is working well. Given that we have testimony saying it is not working well and there have been no consequences for those who are involved in abuses, that suggests the safeguards as they exist are failing. The government wants to take away more safeguards without addressing some of the context issues. My focus is on addressing the issues of context and the issues of safeguards in order to protect people who are vulnerable.