Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise to speak to the issue of medical assistance in dying, or as we call it more often in this country, government-assisted dying.
Canada is a pariah on the international stage when it comes to the way we have implemented this. Here is an interesting story. California and Canada legalized assisted dying, or assisted suicide in the case of California, in the same year at about the exact same time. California has about the same population as Canada. California has a very similar political outlook on the world as Canada. The difference in the application of MAID is profound, just in the raw numbers of it. In Canada, we have over 15,000 people a year ending their lives through MAID. It sounds like it is going to be more this year. In California, there are about 300 people per year. That is a huge difference, and there are lots of reasons for that. We can speculate about all of those reasons, but I just wanted to put that out there.
We are a distinct outlier in the world, in Canada, in terms of the MAID regime. I would point out that both Great Britain and Slovenia have looked at Canada, have had referendums on this issue and, because of the situation in Canada, have rejected the MAID regime entirely. They said they would not poison people to death and would demand that their health care systems promote the health care of their people, not the death of their people.
I remember back in 2016-17 when the first MAID bill came in. I remember saying that it was a radical bill and that this was going to be a slippery slope. I was wrong about that. It has been a cliff, not a slippery slope. We are now on our sixth piece of legislation expanding MAID. We thought Justin Trudeau was a radical prime minister on this file.
I remember being quite skeptical of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott. They kind of led the charge when it came to the Liberals bringing in the bill in the first place. I remember calling them radical and thinking they were radical. It turns out now that they were the voices of restraint when it came to this. I remember there were Liberals at the time who voted against the bill because they did not feel it went far enough. Here we are, once again, with an expansion of MAID in this country. There seems to be no concern or upper limit to the Liberals' desire for Canadians to have the right to end their lives.
Now, I would say that in Canada, the deaths of despair, whether they be drug overdose or whatever they are, continue to increase. We hear constantly, story after story, from family members of somebody who was offered MAID when they did not want it or took MAID when their family was unaware that they were even ill, and there is no recourse. There is no ability for the family to question what went on. They have no ability to get any information about it because the patient is dead, the patient is gone, and there was a discussion between the doctor and the patient.
Now the government wants to expand MAID once again, with advance directives. I would point out that advance directives have been a part of the discussion all the way through, and since 2015-16, they have been rejected all the way through. They have not been studied in depth the same way that MAID for mental illness has, and I would suggest that Canadians have firmly rejected MAID for mental illness.
The government has been supremely cynical by doing the thing that Canadians wanted it to do, by repealing MAID for mental illness, but putting advance directives for MAID in the same bill, pairing one off against the other. That is supremely cynical on behalf of the government. The Liberals had their opportunity to vote for Bill C-218, and they rejected it. I thought they just wanted to take credit for it, and they can take credit for it now that they are bringing the bill forward.
The piece around advance directives is about contemporaneous consent. I remember moving motions and amendments to the original bill, trying to emphasize contemporaneous consent. The California model requires that in the moment that MAID is being administered, a nod must be given or the patient must press the button, essentially.
Back in 2017, I felt the original MAID bill, I think it was Bill C-14 at the time, did not do enough to ensure contemporaneous consent, and here we are with advance directives being so far away from contemporaneous consent, because an advance directive could be signed decades before the situation ever arises. Maybe nobody has had a conversation for years about what advance directives even mean, but suddenly a number of different motivations have come into play. Suddenly, a bunch of people who are not the individual would be making a decision about whether this person should be euthanized or not, with no contemporaneous consent.
We have examples from around the world, such as from the Netherlands, where this kind of thing happens. There is a particularly horrific story about a Dutch lady who had dementia. She was physically very healthy. She was not in pain in any way whatsoever. She was happy and she ate well. She was living in an extended care facility, and her advance directive said that when she could no longer recognize her children, she would like MAID. That was what her advance directive said. She still had her faculties and could still participate in conversation. She knew what was happening day by day, but she did not recognize her children most of the time. That is 100% the truth.
On the day that she was going to be euthanized, she knew she was going to be euthanized, and she pleaded with everybody she came into contact with that day, telling them that she did not want to die. However, because there was an advance directive, her coffee was drugged and she was compelled. The horrific part about it and why it ended up being in the news is that her family had come and gathered around her, and they had to restrain her because the drugs from her coffee wore off. They had to restrain her while they euthanized her. That was a horrific experience for all involved, but it was what the advance directive said.
Despite the fact that she repeatedly said to multiple people that day that she did not want to die, she was euthanized. She was euthanized because her advance directive said that when she could no longer recognize her children, she did not want to live anymore. She was perfectly healthy. There was nothing physically wrong with her. She was eating well and she had joy in her life, but she could not recognize her children any longer.
That is not the case for every dementia patient. Some dementia patients live with a lot of angst, and we need to work to minimize the effects of dementia. Dementia is a horrific disease that I know about. I have experience with family members who had it, and it is a horrific disease. It is tragic to watch a loved one decline in that respect, but offering them MAID or having to compel somebody else to murder them is no solution to the problem.