Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to the NDP amendment, as well as to the underlying issues raised by Bill C-14, and to address some outstanding issues.
The first thing I want to do is pick up on a question that my colleague from the NDP just asked with respect to choice. Many of the arguments in favour of this legislation have been framed around this idea of choice. However, at the same time we have to acknowledge that this bill is designed to impose significant limitations on choice as well. It does not legalize suicide in every case. I think it clearly suggests that there still ought to be limits on choice. That is a good thing. However, those limitations do not at all protect the vulnerable. They do not go nearly far enough. We would understand the limits of choice in that choice is shaped by values and social norms, and my colleague touched on this as well. The stigma and social acceptability around something shapes the kinds of choices that are made.
In light of the Supreme Court decision and the fact that we have to respond to it, I am very concerned, and I think many of my colleagues at least on this side of the House but perhaps in other corners of the House are concerned that suicide remain a socially unacceptable choice, and that maybe it should be allowed in certain narrow circumstances as required, but that we do not allow ourselves to shift in a direction where we remove the fundamental stigma around taking human life, and that we maintain a fundamental respect for the intrinsic value and dignity of all human life. It is my belief that going down that road only a little bit is very difficult and perhaps even impossible. In the debate around this issue, we have already seen that, as soon as the can of worms is opened a little bit, there is a major push for expansion to all kinds of other different situations.
The language used, and the language that some members and the NDP amendment want to limit this to, is “grievous and irremediable”. It seems to me that people who take their life do so because they consider themselves to be facing grievous and irremediable suffering. Clearly, there is no one who takes his or her life who does not think that. Therefore, it is not at all a simple matter, as some members have suggested, to clearly demarcate suicide; and then, on the other hand, what is covered by this issue? Choice always has limits. It must have limits, especially when choices may impact the broader social architecture of choice under which other people operate. I think that is an important point that is underlined here, that we need to try, as much as possible, to preserve that underlying concept of the value of human life. I do not think that Bill C-14 has nearly the safeguards to do that. What we could have had, and what we should have at the very least, is some kind of clear legal criteria.
It has been interesting in the discussion today that we have the minister really highlighting the importance of the “reasonably foreseeable” criterion. I do not support the NDP amendment. All things being equal, I would still like “reasonably foreseeable” to remain in the bill, although I agree with the NDP that it is not at all clear what that means. Then the minister talks about the importance of this criterion and how the entire bill, the system of safeguards, was developed with that criterion in mind. She said that, clearly, if we did not have that aspect in the criteria, we would need additional safeguards. Therefore, she is putting a very large amount of weight on those two undefined words. She said that the Liberals would not want “reasonably foreseeable” to apply to a young person who had some kind of an accident and became permanently disabled. They would not want “reasonably foreseeable” to apply to somebody with just a mental health challenge. However, without meaning to those words, without some kind of clarity, it is not at all clear that those cases that the minister has identified are even excluded by this legislation. Therefore, in a sense, she defeats her own argument by saying that this legislation has limited safeguards because of the narrowing of the criteria, such as only a 10-day waiting period, but given that there was no meaningful, well-defined, narrowing of the criteria, then she acknowledges effectively that the safeguards in this bill are inadequate.
If this legislation were written with a tighter narrowing of criteria in mind, then perhaps we should have actually had some definition of what constituted the new criteria. We should have had some kind of definition of what this means. Of course, Conservatives proposed an amendment to add the word “imminent”. We can say that death is reasonably foreseeable for all of us, but death is not imminent for all of us. That would have at least provided some metric for establishing a distinction between some cases and other cases. The lack of criteria is a huge problem.
It is important, in recognizing the absence of clear criteria, that we again investigate putting review criteria in place. We have seen what the provinces have already done. The reason I say we are not in a legal vacuum is that there is no federal legislation but there are provincial rules in place, so we are not in a legal vacuum, as such, strictly speaking. There are policies and procedures in place at the provincial level. The provinces have introduced many very good safeguards that are not in this federal legislation, and it is important to say that those safeguards, in many cases, would not apply after the federal legislation passes.
Provincial guidelines, in most cases that I have seen, refer to the involvement of the attending physician. They do not just say any two physicians. They say there is some role for an attending physician and a consulting physician, implying that the person involved in adjudicating the case should be, in some ways, involved in the care of the patient and not be some doctor somewhere else who has agreed to sign all the forms for almost anyone. The involvement of the attending physician is important. It could have been included in the federal legislation, but if the federal legislation passes saying any two doctors, then the requirement for an attending physician being involved would no longer apply, because it would be prescribed a certain way in the Criminal Code.
I would encourage the government to take the experience and wisdom of the provinces seriously on this, recognizing that there are no effective legal criteria up front, there are only undefined legal criteria, and we should add in some of the more effective review mechanisms to ensure that, however ambiguous the criteria are, the legal criteria are being met, in fact, such as they are.
I have advocated for the Manitoba model, or some element of it, to be incorporated into the federal model, which involves government lawyers looking at each case. I asked my friend from Victoria about this, and he said that could pose an unnecessary barrier, such as if there are no lawyers available. The model that the Government of Manitoba has put in place includes government lawyers available to review each case. It is not as if one has to go out and find someone, and it is not a process of needing to make an application to the court, although there are, frankly, plenty of cases in the world where someone might need to make an urgent application to a court and there are provisions to allow that to happen.
Therefore, it is not at all true that this is sort of an impossibly onerous barrier, but the Government of Manitoba has done something much less than requiring judicial review. It has simply put in place a system where there is advance legal review by government lawyers. Recognizing the value of that model, that review process, the government should think about incorporating that into federal legislation or, at the very least, ensure it is not proceeding in a way that interferes with or overturns that provincial set-up.
In conclusion, I want to speak briefly to the issue of protecting the vulnerable. There has been some discussion here about what constitutes vulnerability and who is vulnerable. We can understand “vulnerable” as referring to people who probably, in ideal circumstances, would not choose death, but are in some way in not ideal circumstances, which limits them and propels them toward a choice they would not otherwise make. This can happen often, whether it is a person who does not have perspective because of his or her situation, or whether someone is sort of the victim of suicide contagion and is responding to other things and situations happening in his or her life. It could be someone who is influenced more by social than physical circumstances. We need to be attentive to these things, and that speaks to the importance of robust safeguards.
I hope we can, as a House, still at this last stage, try to bring in some meaningful definitions and safeguards that would protect the vulnerable and protect Canadian society.
