Madam Speaker, it is my honour and privilege to rise today to speak to Bill C-218, a bill that would repeal the coming into force of MAID for mental illness as the sole underlying cause for concern.
Canada is becoming a parable. It is becoming an example of what not to do for the world. The United Kingdom recently had a discussion about introducing euthanasia or MAID to the country. It looked at Canada and said, “That is not what we want to do”, and it actually rejected it.
I remember back in 2016-17 making arguments in the discussion about introducing MAID into Canada and calling it a slippery slope. I can say that I was wrong when I said it was a slippery slope. It turns out that it was a cliff. We had no idea that we were going to fall off this cliff. One-fifth of people who die in Canada die because of MAID. This is a major cause for concern.
We can look to other jurisdictions that are very similar to Canada. California has demographics similar to Canada's, has similar political understandings and has a similar population, yet in the same time frame, we saw that 13,000 people in Canada used the MAID program and only 300 people used the assisted suicide program in California. Something is seriously wrong with our system.
When MAID was brought into Canada, there were two criteria for it. Someone had to have a reasonably foreseeable death, something that we argued against. We said that was nebulous; we did not know what that meant. Most people's death is reasonably foreseeable. We will all die. That was one criterion for MAID, along with the fact that a condition had to be grievous and irremediable.
That was then challenged in the courts. I recall that we had just passed the MAID regime through Parliament. Parliament had spoken as to what the law ought to be in Canada. Just a couple of years later, it was challenged by two people from Quebec, and it was overturned at the first level of court in Quebec.
David Lametti, the justice minister at the time, refused to defend the work of Parliament. His personal opinions on MAID and the direction it should go were well known, but as the justice minister of Canada, it was his responsibility to defend what Parliament had put in place, and he refused to or was negligent and did not do that. He did not challenge the lower court decision in Quebec.
Therefore, that decision stood, and that then placed an arbitrary deadline upon Parliament to come up with a solution. That is how we got the so-called track 2 MAID, and along with that came the idea, which they put in in 2026 and then extended out to 2027, that MAID for mental illness should become a thing here in Canada.
There has been a committee study since then that looked at this. I tried to answer this question: Is Canada ready for MAID for mental illness? We heard over and over from people who said that if somebody is suicidal and wants to die, we cannot determine who will get better and who will not get better. There is no test for this. That is reason it was extended for one more year, because they said we had to continue to work on it.
Here we are, about a year out from that, and there is still no test today. When somebody calls the suicide prevention hotline, there is no test to say that someone is going to come around, that we can put them into treatment, they will recover and have a desire to live again and we should put them into a suicide prevention program.
There is no test for people to say they will send one person to the suicide prevention program and another person will be offered MAID. There is no test to say one person is going to recover and another person is not. We just do not know. The default should be that people having suicidal ideations will get better. We will give them treatment, support them and try to remove the things in their lives causing the suicidal ideation.
I would point Canadians to the work by my colleague, the member for Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, and the many speeches he has given on this, saying that, if this had been the law several years ago, he would not be here today because he would have availed himself of it. Today, he is a member of Parliament and a high-functioning individual. He is laughing at that. It is a true story. I thank him for being vulnerable with us, sharing these stories over and over again, telling this story and being a champion for Bill C-218.
Bill C-218 would make it so that we have suicide prevention in this country and only suicide prevention in this country. It is not for the Government of Canada to set up a program where some people get suicide prevention treatment and some people do not get suicide prevention treatment. That is not a country any of us want to live in, where we say suicide prevention is good for one person but not good for another person. We heard over and over again at committee that there is no test to determine the difference.
With that, I look forward to voting on this bill. I will be voting for it. I am very hopeful this bill will pass and we will once again restore suicide prevention in this country.