Mr. Speaker, in case I do not have time at the end, I would like to wish you, your family and those at the table a very merry Christmas.
I would like to finish up my speech on Bill C-7 and my concerns. What highlights it more than my speaking for another four minutes are quotes from key individuals.
The Liberal member of Parliament for Thunder Bay—Rainy River, a doctor, said:
...as someone with a medical background and somebody who has dealt with this issue over the years a lot, I think morally it's incumbent upon me to stand up when it comes to issues of health and life and death....
My biggest concern, as someone who has spent my whole life trying to avoid accidentally killing people, is that we don't end up using MAID for people who don't really want to die....
I think, with a bit of time, people may come around to the fact that there are reasons they want to live.
I will go to another quote from another current Liberal member of Parliament, the member for Delta, British Columbia, who said, “I absolutely acknowledge and am quite preoccupied by the power imbalance between practitioners and patients, particularly patients who have been in systems that have discriminated against them and ignored their voices their entire lives. I have grave concerns with the particular circumstances of the individual that you spoke of”.
The individual is Roger Foley in this case. The quote comes from a Senate committee. She continued, “Quite frankly, I can tell you, he is not alone. I regularly hear from families who are appalled by the fact that they take their child, potentially their older child, in and are offered unprovoked [medical assistance in dying]. I think that has to stop. That’s a matter of practice, I would suggest, and we need to get at that through our regulations, through working with our medical associations.”
Here we see highlighted, even by our very own colleagues across the way in the Liberal Party, grave concerns about the current bill and the way it is written.
I will go to another quote from another doctor, Dr. Catherine Ferrier, who said:
To leave to doctors the decision about providing [medical assistance in dying] to anyone who meets the criteria is to entrust them with life-and-death decisions for millions of people in a vulnerable position. Doctors have the same limitations as everyone else does, which may include unconscious bias towards [medical assistance in dying] as an option and against living in certain situations. No one should [ever] have that power.
It should be made clear in the law that [medical assistance in dying] is not a medical treatment on the same level with real treatments. It's not a standard of care. It should be a last resort when all other reasonable options have failed.
I have one last quote by Dr. Trudo Lemmens and Leah Krakowitz-Broker from an op-ed, which states:
...unlike any other country in the world, the new bill fails to explicitly require that all reasonable...options be made available and tried first, before allowing physicians to end a patient’s life.
In other words, the bill makes dying easier than living.
Rather than instilling hope and helping to build resilience by focusing on options for living, health care providers will now be asked to discuss an early death.
The conversation I have heard far too many times from concerned citizens is that we have put our seniors, our disabled community and other communities in an abhorrent situation where they have to choose between treatment or death, based on the outside pressures of costs, burdens to their family and so forth. These are choices that should never have to be made by those who should be treated the best in our society.
It has been said many times in the House, over 300 times I know from our side and others, that this bill needs to change before it is—