Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin my comments today by reiterating a request that has been made by many of my colleagues here in the House of Commons, which is to split the bill.
Bill C-41 is a real moral dilemma. The way it has been politically manipulated is of great concern. It is only by splitting the bill into two separate decisions, two separate votes by members of the House, that I think it could be fairly presented to the public as an appropriate examination of the very serious medical and moral issues that are embedded within it.
I was trying to explain to one of my constituents earlier what the moral dilemma is exactly. What I found to be helpful was a reference to the movie The Dark Knight. There is a scene in which the Joker calls Batman and tells him that his girlfriend, Rachel Dawes, has been left in one room. On the other side of Gotham, the DA, Harvey Dent, has been left in the other room. The Joker tells Batman that he has to make a choice and that it is going to suck regardless. It is going to be a really hard, horrible decision. He only gets to make one decision on who he gets to save.
That is what has been presented to us with Bill C-41. Every member of the House, from all parties, is being put in this situation by the Prime Minister and whomever in the government is making the decision to combine these two elements of a very complicated and dense issue into one bill. Whoever is making that decision is putting every single one of us in the exact same situation that the Joker put Batman in.
We are not going to feel good about the decision we make at the end of the day. Either we are going to vote against the bill, which has a very important and needed element in it, to further protect people with mental illness from euthanasia, or we are going to vote against the bill, because it also expands euthanasia to include people with dementia and other illnesses. These are really two things that should not be combined.
I feel obligated to point out the cynical, cold and callous nature in which these two things have been combined into one bill. Every member of the House had an opportunity to vote on a Conservative private member's bill that would have only addressed the expansion of MAID to those facing mental illness. All members of the Conservative Party voted for that bill. All members of the NDP voted for that bill. In fact, we even had one bold, brave soul on the other side of the aisle, in the Liberal ranks, vote for that bill. The remainder of that party voted against it. Why? What would possibly be the reason, other than the cold and cynical ploy to wedge those of us, with a heavy heart and a heavy conscience on this issue, into combining our very well-intentioned opposition to the expansion of euthanasia to those with mental illness and forcing us to also reconcile that with the expansion to more Canadians?
That is not the way this place should work. I will be honest. I appreciate that politics is an ugly and dirty game. I can appreciate that a lot of this is about wedging people constantly. On something so heavy, on something that is such a matter of conscience, I really do hope that the government will reconsider and split the bill when it comes time to vote.
How I would like to use the remainder of my time is to address why this is such a concern for people. I think a good place to start is to capture the fact that since 2016, MAID, or as I call it, euthanasia, has become a very common form of death for people in this country. In 2016, it was slightly over 1,000 people that were killed by euthanasia. In 2024, it was 16,499, which is the most recent statistic, in one year. In total, over an eight-year period, over 76,000 Canadians have had their lives ended through the practice of euthanasia.
I raise this because I think that there are two ways that people look at that information. Some people might look at that and think that this is a sign of progress. I shudder at that thought, as do many Canadians. I look at that number and my heart breaks. I know many people who have been in very serious situations, facing very serious illnesses.
I am a stage 4 cancer survivor. There was a time in my life when my mother and I sat in a room and a doctor said to me that I might not live. I know what that is like. I know what it is like to sit in a cancer ward and see people who are on their third, fourth or fifth year of chemotherapy. I know what it is like to sit in a hospital waiting room and see people lined up waiting to go through radiation, hoping that maybe this time it is going to work. I have seen people face death. I have faced death, so when I see numbers like this, my heart breaks, because I wonder how many of those people made the decision to end their life based on fear and because they were scared. I have been there, and I have seen people there.
When we talk about advance directives and a medical professional approaching a sick person saying that they should make a decision now about how their life is going to end, it is very concerning. The emotional roller coaster of a serious illness is very real. There are times when a person may be depressed. There are times when their spirit may be broken, and they might consider it a good decision to end their life at some point on their own terms. However, we never know what life is going to throw at us, and we never know how our life is going to change. We do not know how it is going to feel in the moment. Opposing advance directives is about saying that at minimum, people deserve the dignity to make such a choice of great finality in the moment, and that we should not have a system designed such that potential coercion or the exploitation of a very emotional and difficult situation leads to a decision that a person may pay the ultimate price for.
We have heard from families on the other side of this debate. We have heard from people with loved ones in very extreme situations on the other side of this debate. I do not want to pretend that this is simple. I am not trying to diminish another point of view. I get that this is complicated. I am not trying to point a finger at anyone and say there is a bad guy in this story. What I am trying to do is point out that these are very serious things we are debating in the House of Commons, both from a moral perspective and from a health care perspective. I am trying to point out that people come to their conclusions on these issues for very good reasons, whether that is their personal life, family life or religious or philosophical convictions, whatever they may be.
Wherever we wind up on this debate, I believe, humbly, that it is a cheapening of the issue to combine both of these very complicated questions into one bill. If I could leave anyone listening to my words with one message, it would be to please consider the weight of this. If we are taking this as seriously as we should, then it should not be something that gets lumped into some kind of omnibus euthanasia discussion. Every single way we decide which Canadians become vulnerable to the practice of euthanasia and which ones do not should be treated with the weight of significant individual policies and legislative decisions in mind, as it should be.
I would also like to elaborate on why I think it is very important that we consider the difficulty of asking an ill person to make this decision in an advance request context.
I remember when I was first told that I might pass away from stage 4 cancer. The hardest part of the entire ordeal for the year and a half that I was a hospital patient, in the hospital every day, was seeing my mom go through it. I can absolutely understand why a sick person might say, “I do not want to put the responsibility on my family to have to make a difficult decision about my life one day.” I can absolutely understand why someone would say, “The moral thing to do is to take that responsibility onto myself.” To anyone who feels that way, my word of encouragement would be that if they talk to the relatives of people who have been in those situations, they will find that many of them were very happy to have taken care of their ill loved ones and were very happy to have been by their side even when it was difficult.