Madam Speaker, this is interesting. I have the exact statistics somewhere in my mound of paperwork on this particular topic, but it would appear that year over year, in Canada, many more physicians are participating in the MAID regime. It is a sad reflection on society that those physicians could easily be trained to provide better palliative care. We know there is a call for patients across the country to receive appropriate palliative care.
Many folks in the chamber may think of palliative care as simply giving people more medication to end their physical pain. However, we know clearly from those who provide good-quality palliative care that it is about having conversations with families, partly about providing medication, talking about the lives they have had and talking about the difficulties they may have suffered. It is also very clearly, with its patient-centred approach, about what their goals of care are and how to meet those needs.
That often takes a very specialized team of people. However, if we look at the number of physicians choosing to provide MAID who are not providing palliative care, there is an obvious ability to recruit those physicians, in the appropriate circumstances, to provide good-quality palliative care for folks who are not able to receive it. Again, this exists in many rural and remote places across Canada. It is a real travesty when that situation exists.