Madam Speaker, I am sharing my time with the member for Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake.
I rise today on behalf of the caring Canadians in the compassionate riding of Algonquin—Renfrew—Pembroke to speak to Bill C-41, the medical assistance in dying safeguards act.
I want to begin by thanking the co-chairs and the elected members of the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying for their work in reviewing calls to expand medical assistance in dying to those who are not dying but instead suffering from mental illness. The committee is bipartisan. It recommended to permanently exclude mental illness as a sole condition for receiving medical assistance in dying, which is welcomed by my constituents and the vast majority of Canadians who have survived mental illness or who are currently living with severe mental illness.
My Conservative colleagues on the special joint committee included a number of supplementary recommendations that I believe should be highlighted before the bill is brought to committee.
The first recommendation was to call on the government to support the member for Cloverdale—Langley City's private member's bill to permanently exclude mental illness as a condition to access medical assistance in dying. Sadly, the government rejected the recommendation and voted down the bill. Instead, the government brought forward a bill expanding medical assistance in dying to allow advance requests, which had not been studied by the special joint committee. While the bill does include the permanent repeal of mental illness as an eligible condition by including it in the legislation to expand access to MAID and voting against a clean bill, the government has politicized this sensitive issue. This was a regrettable decision by the government, but I truly hope we can return to a more collegial approach when it goes to committee.
While the government has given this bill the short title of it being the medical assistance in dying safeguards act, its purpose is not to create safeguards but to allow advance requests. In setting out the criteria for advance requests, the government reveals how difficult any safeguards for advance requests would be.
The bill states:
if, by virtue of subsection (6), medical assistance in dying on the basis of the advance request was previously not provided because there was doubt as to whether the person’s words, sounds or gestures constituted a demonstration of refusal or resistance, ensure that there are at least 30 clear days between the day on which the words, sounds or gestures were observed by a medical practitioner or nurse practitioner and the day on which the medical assistance in dying on the basis of that request is provided;
What the bill is saying is that anyone who has given an advance request on the basis of having an illness where death is reasonably foreseeable can later refuse to go through with it. If there is any subjective doubt felt by the medical practitioner as to whether their patient has refused, the medical practitioner must wait 30 days before trying to administer a substance that would cause death. This alone calls into question any diagnosis that death was reasonably foreseeable. It creates that perverse incentive where a medical practitioner must decide if they doubt the patient's attempt at refusal or they doubt their own medical judgment. No Canadian's life should be lost to confirmation bias.
Even the criteria for administering MAID following an advance request includes a subjective opinion by the medical practitioner that the person who has lost the capacity to consent is experiencing intolerable physical or psychological suffering. If a person has lost the capacity to consent, how can their psychological suffering be assessed? Not only are the limited measures in the bill an insufficient safeguard, the government is downloading the job onto the provinces.
That the government would take this approach so soon after the Ontario government gutted its own MAID review panel is all the more troubling. The fact that Ontario's MAID review panel is run by the coroner's office only highlights the lack of safeguards.
This is why Conservatives made a different recommendation, which states:
The government should work with provinces and territories to establish minimum national standards for MAID oversight to ensure the effectiveness and enforceability of MAID safeguards.
Those standards should include prospective review mechanisms capable of pausing or stopping a provision where serious compliance concerns arise before death, stronger review of prior records and assessments, clear referral pathways for potential Criminal Code violations, and greater independence of oversight bodies from MAID delivery systems.
Given the irreversibility of MAID, genuine safeguards would ensure a case could be stopped before proceeding. Families should not be forced to go to court to protect their loved ones. Doctors should not be assessing patients for MAID in a Tim Hortons parking lot, then driving the patient to the clinic to be killed, as Dr. James MacLean did. Dr. MacLean only received a slap on the wrist from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario for his drive-through MAID.
The bill provides no safeguards for the kind of doctor shopping that saw an Ontario man denied MAID in this province seek out Ellen Wiebe in B.C., who assisted in his suicide for irritable bowel syndrome. That man's family was not as lucky as the family of an Alberta woman who also was denied MAID in her province but was approved for MAID after a zoom call with Ellen Wiebe. That family secured a court injunction, and the woman stopped seeking MAID.
Those are just two examples of cases where the current safeguards failed to stop a doctor and MAID activist like Ellen Wiebe. That a court found Dr. Wiebe to be mistaken in granting a track 2 MAID approval called into question the current lack of safeguards. That no criminal charges have followed the court findings proves the safeguards are insufficient. Does anyone believe that doctors such as Ellen Wiebe or James MacLean would have any doubts if a patient who gave an advance request unclearly indicates a refusal?
Conservatives recommended a full review of the effectiveness and enforceability of current MAID safeguards to prevent vulnerable Canadians from being assisted in committing suicide, but instead of listening to our recommendations, the bill would expand MAID to advance requests. Fortunately, it is not too late. We can delete the clauses expanding MAID and turn the bill into a real set of nationally enforceable safeguards. While the government was playing politics and voting down my colleague's clean bill earlier, we can put that aside to transform this bill from one that would expand MAID to one that would provide real safeguards.
Elected parliamentarians from the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party worked together on the special joint committee to find common ground in rejecting the expansion of MAID to people solely suffering from mental illness. While we may disagree on expanding MAID to include advance requests, the majority of people on both sides of this debate are motivated by compassion, yet when it comes to mental illness, or it comes to those who are suffering but whose deaths are not reasonably foreseeable, offering MAID is not compassion, but an admission of our failure to provide the compassion required to live a life of meaning and purpose.
Tomorrow, the government will undoubtedly table a budget filled with more compassion for investors and corporations than for those suffering in silence, and while the government gives hundreds of millions of dollars to fake spaceports and fraudulent electric buses, Canadians linger in hospital hallways. We do not need half measures like five-year funding formulas that add marginal capacity to mental health services. We need bold moves like the Manhattan Project to fight mental illness. If we are not successful in eradicating mental illness, the effort alone could be the hope so many people need.
Killing is not compassion. Fighting for everyone to enjoy a life of meaning and purpose is compassion. If we do not take this opportunity to increase the safeguards and effectively roll back track 2 for all but the most extreme cases, then all we would be doing is greasing the slippery slope. Ever since the Supreme Court overturned precedent and invented a right to death, we have witnessed exactly what so many predicted would happen. Advocates keep on pushing to expand it. First it was those without terminal illness. Then it was those with only mental illness. Now we have doctors asking for the power to decide if an infant's life is worth living. They will not stop pushing it until they find a court to allow it. Nine unelected judges should never decide whose life has value and whose does not. It falls to Parliament to fight for life.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.