Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time today with the hon. member for Battle River—Crowfoot.
I rise today to participate in this important debate on Bill C-7, which seeks to expand medical assistance in dying, or MAID. While the Liberal government has summarily dismissed the role of Parliament with respect to the all-party committee study, an evaluation of this law, I believe it is still important to ensure my remarks appear on the record because Bill C-7 is literally a matter of life and death.
Let me begin by quoting my hon. colleague, the member for Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, who posed this question to the government during the earlier days of our hybrid sittings. In the context of advocating for defibrillators to be placed in community halls, hockey rinks and other places Canadians gather, he asked:
It will cost approximately a billion dollars to renovate Centre Block. I believe that's accurate. It will cost $5 million to put these AEDs, defibrillators, into all police cruisers. This would save 300 lives per annum. Is the cost of saving 300 lives per annum—one half of 1% of a billion dollars—more or less important than renovating Centre Block?
My colleagues on both sides of the House know I am a strong supporter of our institutions and our history, and of protecting them for future generations to appreciate, learn from and, in some cases, even revere. This is true of Parliament, historic sites across Canada and even statues of our founders for their vision and even, at times, for their faults, and sometimes many faults. My hon. colleague for Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston was posing a simple but profound question to Parliament, which was what is the value of life, and how can it be measured? It is a question that all members of Parliament have been consumed with since the start of the coronavirus pandemic: How can we protect and save lives? It is a question that will form the basis of debate in the House of Commons for the remainder of our natural lives and well beyond.
In just over eight months, all levels of government have spent a combined half a trillion dollars in their struggle against the pandemic. Rich or poor, old or young, married or single, with kids or grandparents: it does not matter what families or households look like. Everyone is impacted by COVID-19, and governments have acted. The measures brought forward were, in one way or another, based on one simple, profound truth: that elected officials at every level of government across the country support life, and want our nation to fight for it and protect it.
I stand today as someone who will be voting against this piece of legislation, Bill C-7. Medically assisted death is a practice that, if left unchecked, could in some dark corners of society turn the right to die into an obligation to die.
How is it that a government that advocated overwhelmingly to accept closures and economic lockdowns in response to the coronavirus can be the same government that has unmoored us from protecting Canadians, by vastly expanding the legal parameters of medically assisted death? It is grisly.
I would like to quote the member for Vancouver Granville, the former minister of justice, who stated the following about this legislation, Bill C-7:
[Why] is Bill C-7, medical assistance in dying, abolishing the safeguard of a 10-day reflection period and reconfiguration of consent, thereby introducing advance requests for MAID?
Nothing in the Truchon decision of the Quebec Court of Appeal, which the government chose not to appeal, requires this, and the Supreme Court of Canada, in Carter, insisted on the requirement of clear consent. Palliative care physicians, disability advocates and other experts insist that this is an important safeguard and, like other legislated MAID reports on mature minors and mental disorder, advance requests also raise significant challenges.
It is very troubling that this is the direction the Liberals have chosen. A single decision in a single province by a single lower court has upended the law as it stands today, passed by a previous Parliament.
A culture of life is abandoned. Even the most basic safeguards are deemed by the current justice minister, the cabinet and caucus to be overly restrictive. We have a fragile consensus established in the last Parliament and with Bill C-7, we will undo that important consensus. I hope we can rediscover that consensus again in a future Parliament when its leaders are more reflective on matters of life and death and perhaps will express some humility when we face these questions.
We must, as parliamentarians, even those who sit across the aisle, reject the unwise extension of medical assistance in dying in our society. However, I am dismayed that this will not happen.
Bill C-7 is medical assistance in dying in name only. Its sponsors cling to that description to give it a fig leaf of respectability and to make it palatable to the public. Bill C-7 would strip away both safeguards to protect vulnerable Canadians and even the belief that one's death should be near, imminent or even reasonably foreseeable. Whereas medical assistance in dying has built in safeguards, today's bill does not and we are simply left with medical assisted death.