moved:
That a special committee be appointed, pursuant to Standing Order 68(4)(b), to review the provisions of the Criminal Code dealing with euthanasia and physician assisted suicide and that the committee be instructed to prepare and bring in a bill, in accordance with Standing Order 68(5).
Mr. Speaker, on February 12, 1994 my friend Sue Rodriguez died at her home in Sidney, British Columbia. She died with the assistance of a courageous and understanding doctor who risked a term of life imprisonment for breaking the law, section 241 of the Criminal Code of Canada.
As many members of this House will know, Sue Rodriguez had fought with incredible dignity, strength and courage, to the Supreme Court of Canada ultimately, to change this law. She appeared before the House of Commons justice committee. She made a whole nation aware of this profoundly important issue.
While she may have lost ultimately by the narrowest possible margin of five to four at the Supreme Court of Canada, for many of us it was the words of dissenting Justice Peter Cory that resonated most powerfully:
The life of an individual must include dying. Dying is the final act in the drama of life. The right to die with dignity should be as well protected as is any other aspect of the right to life. State prohibitions that would force a dreadful, painful death on a rational but incapacitated terminally ill patient are an affront to human dignity.
While there may have been division in the Supreme Court of Canada, there was unanimity on one issue, that it was ultimately up to the House of Commons, the elected House of the people of Canada, to make a decision as to what the law should or should not state on this profoundly important issue. All the judges who considered this issue were unanimous on that point, the Supreme Court of British Columbia, the B.C. Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada.
I note that prior to the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, starting in 1991 a number of other members of Parliament had raised this issue in the House: Bob Wenman, late Conservative member of Parliament from British Columbia, my former colleague Ian Waddell and my current colleague from Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar.
Following the death of Sue Rodriguez in February 1994, within days of her death, both the prime minister and the then justice minister, currently the Minister of Health, promised that there would be a free vote in this House on this important issue. Four days later the justice minister said: “I am sure that doctors could tell us that a number of people right now are facing terminal illness who would want to have a clarification”. He went on to say: “We will have a free vote as soon as we possibly can”.
The Minister of Justice said, and I quote:
I can assure you that we will find a way to introduce something in the House that will not be theoretical and that will be significant. If that means proposing legislative changes, so be it.
He added:
We will not sit on this. We will do it as quickly as we can.
Almost four years later we have finally achieved that objective of ultimately this House's being able to have a free vote on the issue. In May 1994 it was the national convention of the federal Liberal Party that passed almost unanimously a resolution urging the government to allow a free vote on this important issue.
As well in the spring of 1994, again shortly after the death of Sue Rodriguez, the Senate established a special committee chaired by a very distinguished former senator, Joan Neiman. The committee reported in June 1995, after having held extensive right across the country.
I want to pay tribute to all members of that committee for their work. It was a very important committee and an excellent report called “Of Life and Death”.
Today MPs will have an opportunity following three hours of debate on my motion to vote on this issue and I thank my colleagues from all parties for the opportunity that we have been given for this vote, and it will be a free vote.
I want to explain very carefully and very precisely what this motion seeks to achieve. The motion does not set out the terms for new legislation. It calls for the establishment of a special committee of this House. Obviously it could be decided that the standing committee on justice may be a more appropriate forum, but in any event it calls for a committee of this House to review evidence, certainly not to redo all the work of the Senate committee, to review the findings, the evidence and the recommendations of that committee and then to make recommendations back to this House.
Those recommendations could be very broad or very narrow. As I said, the Senate committee has already done much of the work in this area. The Senate committee was unanimous on a number of recommendations, including the importance of support for palliative care, pain control, and looked at the issue of sedation practices, the so-called double effect, withholding and withdrawal of life sustaining treatment and advance directives. It was able to arrive at unanimous recommendations for changes in those areas of the law.
Senator Sharon Carstairs, one of the members of that committee, tabled a bill last year, Bill S-13, which was strongly supported by Dr. Wilbert Keon, another member of the Senate and one of Canada's foremost heart surgeons. That bill would have clarified the Criminal Code with respect to a couple of key elements. What it would have done was clarify the practice of providing treatment for the purpose of alleviating suffering that may shorten life. It would also recognize explicitly and clarify the circumstances in which withholding and withdrawal of treatment is legally acceptable.
It may be that is as far as this special committee of the House is prepared to go. I would hope that the committee would go further and recommend comprehensive changes to section 241 of the Criminal Code, those changes that were supported by four of the nine judges of the Supreme Court of Canada, three of the seven senators on the special Senate committee, one of whom was Dr. Keon, and a substantial majority of Canadians in every region of Canada who also support these changes.
The Leader of the Opposition has stated that if a government bill were to be presented to Parliament, and presumably that would apply to a private member's motion as well, permitting physician assisted suicide under the conditions which he had set out in his consultation with his constituents, he would vote for that bill. That was because when he surveyed his own constituents he found that something like 82% of those constituents supported this change.
I want in urging the House to change the law to pay tribute to the many dedicated groups and individuals working for this change in the law, including the Right to Die Society and John Hofsess, Dying with Dignity and Marilyn Seguin, groups like Goodbye, the Unitarian Church and many others.
I note as well the issue is being debated in other parts of the world. In fact today we will learn the results of a referendum in Oregon. Earlier in the Australia Northern Territory Premier Marshall Perron courageously fought to bring forward a bill, only to see it ultimately overturned by the national parliament.
Why is it that I believe that the current law is profoundly cruel and unjust and must be changed? Let me first make it very clear that this is not a debate about choosing between palliative care on the one hand and physician assisted suicide on the other. I strongly support the unanimous recommendations of the Senate committee on this issue, which talked about far more resources for palliative care programs, national guidelines and standards, training of health care professionals, an integrated approach to palliative care and more research into palliative care, especially pain control and symptom relief. All of those are fundamentally important.
The best palliative care in the world cannot respond in all circumstances to all suffering, indignity and anguish. I note the Canadian Palliative Care Association has acknowledged that. It pointed out that in something like 16% of cases of terminal illness, the patients must be so sedated that they are “incapable of meaningful interaction with their families”.
There were some patients, some terminally ill people, Sue Rodriguez among them, who did not want to live or to die that way. I argue that in those narrow circumstances in which palliative care cannot respond to the suffering, the pain and the anguish the issue is one of choice, fundamentally of personal autonomy, whether we accept the right of competent adults to decide for themselves how their lives will end.
As it now stands under the current law, the choice is either to continue that suffering and anguish or to be sedated into a state of pharmaceutical oblivion, or to find a doctor who is prepared to break the law and risk life imprisonment, as in the case of Sue Rodriguez, or if you cannot find a doctor, as we have seen tragically in some circumstances, to leave your own country. We saw that with Austin Bastable in 1996. We saw that just recently with my constituent, Mr. Natverlal Thakore, this year. You should not have to leave your country and your family to die in peace.
I find it particularly cruel and barbarous that Mr. Tahkore had to leave his own country and his family to go to die in a motel room in Michigan with the help of a doctor he had probably never met. This is not acceptable.
It is time that we ended the hypocrisy in this area and admitted that assisted suicides are happening now. They are happening with no guidelines, with no review, with no safeguards whatsoever. Tragically, people are ending their own lives, committing suicide while still wanting to live longer. But they are doing it because they are afraid that when the moment comes at which they are totally incapacitated, they will not be able to seek the assistance they desire.
The B.C. Persons with AIDS Society pointed out that this is a very serious concern within that community as well. Its spokesman said in his evidence before the Senate committee that people with HIV disease choosing assisted death as a medical option are being forced as a result of current legislation to seek backstreet euthanasia. He talked about violent methods of euthanasia such as heroin overdoses, razor blades, guns and suffocation using plastic bags.
B.C. social worker Russel Ogden has confirmed in his studies the widespread resort to assisted suicide among people dying of AIDS. The Ontario chief coroner has confirmed that many people are assisting in suicide in this province. Dr. Ted Boadway of the Ontario Medical Association stated at a Canadian Medical Association convention “Doctors are doing it entirely underground and entirely unrecognized, in great fear and anxiety”. One doctor talked about how in his words “you can make a person comfortable with 50 milligrams of Demerol and you can make a person very, very dead with 500 milligrams of Demerol”, and about giving a suffering, terminally ill patient a prescription for sleeping pills but instead of giving her the normal 12, he gave her 40 as she requested. It is happening now but in the shadows, behind closed doors with no safeguards. When people ask what about the slippery slope, those dangers are clearly already there.
Of course there must be strict safeguards in place. The Canadian Medical Association's committee on ethics made a number of recommendations, as did the Senate committee that studied this issue. These are some of the safeguards that have been recommended which I strongly support: the importance of a person's request; being informed, voluntary, enduring and free of any coercion; the importance of the physician ensuring the person is competent and not suffering from any disorder that impairs his or her ability to make the decision; exploring the reasons in detail in incurable illness and severe suffering; the physician not being compelled in any way to participate in euthanasia or assisted suicide and not in a position to gain in any way.
I will also respond briefly to some of the serious concerns that have been raised by people with disabilities and organizations representing people with disabilities, such as the Council of Canadians with Disabilities. They voiced very eloquently their fear that if legislation were brought in that in any way diminished the importance of their lives or devalued their lives, they would strongly oppose it. They are deeply concerned about some of the arguments they have heard around the Tracy Latimer decision.
I emphasize that what is being debated here is fundamentally different. What is being debated here is the right of a competent adult who is terminally or incurably ill to make that decision for himself or herself, not by another person, not by a doctor, not by relative, not by a parent but for himself or herself.
I quote from the B.C. Coalition of People with Disabilities that supports changes to this section of the Criminal Code. It states in its recommendation to the Senate “we support changes that would make it legal to assist in the suicide of adults who know and understand all of the support options available to them and who are physically unable to take their life without assistance”. I was pleased that the coalition intervened in support of Sue Rodriguez in her struggle before the courts.
Some of the most powerful arguments for change in the law come from the families and friends of those who have lost a loved one in terribly agonizing circumstances. Following the death of Sue Rodriguez, I received literally hundreds of incredibly moving letters. I will share a couple of examples.
I got a letter from the son of Quebec author and actor Doris Lussier. His son is Pierre Lussier. He said:
Papa, do not let the politicians, barbarians by any other name, tell me that your horrible cry of mortal pain on the eve of your death, even unconscious, when we were far from your room at the other end of the corridor, was a sign of comfort. I shared in the agony of a charming, joyful, cultivated, reasonable human being, whom I loved more than anyone in the world, with no possibility of releasing him from his suffering as he so often asked of me. He was a total advocate of civilized death.
I could read from many other letters. I could read the letter of a man who wrote to me about his daughter who was in agony most of the time. He said that her jaw would sometimes dislocate when she yawned. She could not move her bowels so her sister had to evacuate her manually every second day. Several huge bed sores developed which never healed. She tried to kill herself by refusing to eat. Finally she had a stroke which prevented her from using her communicator and she spent the last few years of her life in total isolation wailing dreadfully, pleading for an end to her suffering. That is no way to die.
One of the most difficult experiences I have had to live with has been the calls and letters I have received from people who plead with me to find a doctor to help them. I cannot respond to that, but what I can do is to plead with this House to ensure that the law is changed so that we have humanity and justice.
In closing, I want to appeal to all members of the House. Palliative care in and of itself is not enough. Sue Rodriguez had superb palliative care. Let an all-party committee hear from Canadians on all sides of this issue, review the evidence and recommendations of the Senate committee and then report back to the House with legislation to be voted on in a free vote.
It would be a tragic mistake to close the door at this stage to any further debate. Respected doctors like Dr. Keon, nurses and other health care workers, and most of all our own constituents, are asking that the law be, at the very least, clarified and hopefully changed to reflect humanity and justice.
In closing the debate on my previous bill in September 1994 I quoted the final words of my friend Sue Rodriguez and I want to honour her memory by doing so again today. She said:
I hope that my efforts will not have been in vain and that the Minister of Justice will introduce legislation into Parliament soon so that terminally ill people will have another option available, thereby permitting physician assisted suicide for the terminally ill.
May her courageous struggle and that of others who have made the same eloquent plea not be in vain.