Mr. Speaker, it is always a great honour to rise in the House, and, I will say, especially so to speak to this legislation.
One of the reasons I got into politics, one of the planks of my campaign for the nomination for my party, was to put an end to MAID for mental illness. That is a position that up until a few months ago, the Liberal government was dead set opposed to. For years, the Liberals have argued that MAID must expand to include people with mental illness. Even when concerns were being raised about the lack of readiness and the lack of willingness by provinces and physicians, they would not abandon this. They instead kept kicking the can down the road.
It was a great privilege to serve on the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying, a committee that was assembled by Parliament and was tasked very specifically and narrowly to explore the issue of whether MAID could ever be safely or reasonably expanded to people with mental illness. The committee turned back a single recommendation, which Liberal and Conservative members on the committee were united on: that the expansion of MAID to people with only a mental illness not proceed.
To have Liberals and Conservatives in alignment on a matter of conscience, on a matter such as that, is so important, especially on something that just a couple of years ago, just in the previous Parliament, the majority of the Liberal caucus voted against doing.
When Bill C-314 was put forward, a bill to stop the expansion of MAID to mental illness, only eight Liberal members supported it. That is a huge problem. I am grateful they have now come around to the conclusion that Conservatives were warning about for years: that we must protect the vulnerable. People struggling with mental illness need our support.
Yes, we need services and treatment. More importantly, we need to be instilling hope, not sending a message that someone is better off dead than alive. I have said in the House many times, and I will reiterate it so everyone knows, this is an issue that is very personal to me. I nearly lost my life to suicide just under 16 years ago, and I very likely would not be here today if MAID for mental illness had been available in 2010, when I was in my darkest days. I can say that with a level of confidence, seeing how existing safeguards have not worked, how existing safeguards in the MAID regime have not prevented people who do not meet the legal criteria from accessing MAID.
Earlier today, the leader of the official opposition mentioned in his speech the case of Kiano Vafaeian, a 26-year-old who dealt with diabetes and partial blindness, and, more importantly, had a range of mental health issues. He was denied MAID in Ontario, but he went doctor shopping. He went to another province, found one of the most prolific purveyors of MAID in Canada and received it. His family got the call that he had died at the hands of a doctor.
There have been other cases that we heard about at the special joint committee, and others that we have heard in the media. People have also reached out to me with their stories. There are stories of people who have been offered MAID who do not want it and stories of people who do not meet anything resembling the legal criteria right now but who have nonetheless been found eligible or told they would be.
There is a very fundamental question facing parliamentarians right now: If existing safeguards on the current MAID regime right now are not working, how would it be anything other than reckless and irresponsible to expand the system in any way?
This brings us to Bill C-41. Despite the singular recommendation that Liberals and Conservatives agreed on to stop the expansion of MAID to people with mental illness, Bill C-41 is not a bill about that. In fact, the 12 pages of Bill C-41 contain three sentences dealing with MAID for mental illness. Two and a half clauses, but three sentences, of the 12-page bill would stop the expansion of MAID that would allow people with depression, schizophrenia or an eating disorder access to this regime, to a medically guided, medically directed death.
The rest of the bill, the rest of the 12 pages of Bill C-41, proposes an expansion of MAID called advance requests, MAID for people who would not be able to consent because they will have lost the capacity, but who wish to consent ahead of time. This would be people with very real, very serious degenerative neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's and other dementias.
This is something we find deeply concerning, if we have been following the lack of safeguards already. When I look at this bill, I see a range of issues, some of which we have heard mentioned in debate tonight, such as the fact that one does not need to be told that MAID is about to be administered before it is; that a doctor or nurse practitioner has tremendous latitude to make, in their own opinion, a determination as to whether someone's suffering is sufficiently intolerable for the request to be actioned, a request that might have been made a decade earlier; and that if the person says no but the practitioner believes there is sufficient doubt as to whether they were really saying no, the practitioner can simply try again in 30 days. That is what the bill says: They can try again in 30 days if there is doubt as to whether the person was refusing it.
Some of the MAID practitioners in Canada who have become quite well known talked about this issue before Bill C-41 was tabled. Some of these physicians have said that if someone who has an advance request is screaming “no” and flailing their arms around, doctors would disregard that, as they do not believe that is legitimate because they have made a determination that this person does not know what they are saying or doing. Doctors have already said they intend to ignore what I think are already quite lax guidelines and stipulations set out in Bill C-41. If existing safeguards are not working, how can we ever expect an expansion to not lead to many more problems?
At every step of the journey, as we have discussed MAID in Canada, there have been those warning of the slippery slope. If we expand it to this, then there is going to be something else next. At times, many on the Liberal benches have said they are fearmongering. We are barrelling down the slippery slope right now. Every single prediction that has been made about where this is going has come to pass.
I would note that the Liberals have done something very cynical. By marrying the provisions stopping the mental health expansion with advance requests, they are holding a gun to the heads of members of Parliament, forcing us to put a complicated and divisive bill forward on a timeline that is not necessary, because we are all committed on the Conservative benches to ensuring that the mental health expansion does not kick in in March of next year.
If we do nothing, if no legislation is passed, people with a mental illness as a sole underlying condition will be eligible for MAID. That is why Liberals could have done the right thing two weeks ago and voted for Bill C-218, legislation that I was proud to cosponsor and that was put forward by my colleague from Cloverdale—Langley City, legislation supported by the Green Party leader, New Democrats, a couple on the Liberal benches and huge numbers of Canadians, including disability rights advocates and mental health organizations. If the Liberals had supported that bill, we would have been off to the races. We could have had the time necessary to debate and discuss advance requests, hear witness testimony and ensure that all sides and many Canadians had the opportunity to have a say. Instead, we have comments like those from the member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore, who said that the first part of the bill is not only important but urgent, because if we do not pass this bill immediately, this law will take effect on March 17, 2027. He asked every member of this House to vote in favour of Bill C-41 for that reason.
The Liberals are already saying that we are the ones who have to force this bill through to meet a timeline that they are setting by their refusal to separate these two fundamentally distinct provisions. They refuse to allow separate bills or even separate votes on whether to expand MAID to people with mental illness and whether to expand MAID to people who wish to make an advance request. That is a tremendously reasonable response from us to the Liberals, if the Liberals are serious about, as they keep saying, getting this complicated issue right. They should split the bill and dispense with these cynical, divisive politics that are gambling with people's lives.