Health committee  I'll just say thank you for sharing that. It cannot be easy and it takes deep courage too. I also think it conveys a profound message of hope, so thank you for sharing that.

Health committee  With respect to Dr. Gupta and others, including Senator Kutcher, they will tell a room full of psychiatrists who don't share this view that this is one of their core competencies. We are trained to assess and address suicidality. Professor Gagnon was not confused when he said t

Health committee  As you point out, I'm not a lawyer, so this is just my understanding of it and obviously not my expertise and stepping outside of that. I do recall that, even in the original Carter decision and the section 7 argument, I thought part of that was the issue of foreshortened life,

Health committee  What I personally believe we should have is a ministry of living with dignity.

Health committee  Yes, the vast majority do. What we know is that, as Dr. Gagnon was speaking of, there are also many treatments that our patients can't access, even for basic care. We know that less than one in three adults is able to get the basic mental health care they need, and that for thing

Health committee  I think we should be working on helping people live better and to address their real suffering. We can't forget that they're suffering, and it's not just from illness symptoms. It is also from other things. In fact, suicide prevention doesn't focus only on illness. It focuses on

Health committee  That's precisely what I and most of my colleagues fear. You've hit the nail on the head. That is exactly what will happen, and the problem is that we will not know which of those people would have recovered. They will all go in the bucket of MAID assessors saying that this would

Health committee  This is precisely part of the problem. We don't know how it is, or if it is. This is precisely part of the problem and, as I was saying, even some who are pushing for expansion have acknowledged that. The expert panel quite literally said, regarding chronic suicidality, “society

Health committee  We actually know a lot now, and it is completely different from how it was represented initially in some of the earlier consultations. The reason I say that is, the CPA's position aside, we know that on the most recent national survey—it was conducted by the Ontario Psychiatric A

Health committee  Yes, I have. That's precisely part of the challenge here. This is why it's not an issue, as Ms. Long presents it, of autonomy. It's not an issue of capacity of the patient. It's the capacity of the assessor to honestly judge when the person won't get better—and they can't make th

Health committee  On your last question, I'm not trying to be flippant, but I think the only honest answer is that we don't know if we would be ready in three years or not. This is why it's problematic to say that we will be ready in three years when we don't know. The reason we don't know goes

Health committee  It probably means different things, depending on the context, but it reflects a deep ambivalence. The person is not happy. “Happy” is too simplistic a word. The person is not feeling that they're able to live. It's not that they actually want to die. Usually what it reflects is t

Health committee  In my opinion, it would actually be a more honest determination, because it would be openly showing that we're basing it on luck rather than on the false reassurance of a white lab coat.

Health committee  No, I can't point to any, and none has come to light in the past three years either.

Health committee  I'm happy to, and that actually links a bit back to Monsieur Thériault's question, which is trying to set a predetermined timeline by which we will have evidence, and we don't know if we will. The holes are this. If we are saying to people that we are predicting their mental il