Madam Speaker, I am opposed to this bill on the grounds of the advance directives proposal. There is nothing in the bill that would even require that a person who had previously, maybe years before, signed an advance directive be consulted or told what is about to happen to them.
The bill would allow a person to be killed based on a piece of paper they signed perhaps years before, without informing them what is about to happen to them. It is obviously a bit of a stretch to say, in the name of autonomy, that somebody can delegate the power of life and death for them to someone else. It means that somebody else would make that decision for them, again, without asking them or without telling them, potentially, and would have to assess, external to them, what is or is not intolerable in the particular circumstances.
The person signing the advance directive would do so before they even have the lived experience of that condition. If I get a diagnosis today and am asked to sign a document about something in the future that I have never experienced, I am obviously doing that in relative ignorance of that experience.
Does the member share these concerns at all about how this would work in practice? Even if she likes the idea of advance directives in theory, what would it mean in practice when somebody else has the power of life and death over a patient on the basis of something they signed years before?