Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Thank you for having us.

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I'm going to answer your question from someone who has done a data analysis on this. He's an internationally renowned researcher on MAID and suicide numbers. He estimates that, as a lowball estimate, it will be 1,250 to 2,500 cases per year, but it actually would be higher. The b

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I'm sorry. I misunderstood. I thought you asked me if it would be a small number of cases, and I said that it wouldn't be. Did I misunderstand the question?

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I see what you're asking, Mr. Thériault. I don't have a time machine, so I cannot go back in time and predict in advance. If I had, many more would have actually thought that they'd never get better.

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  That's an excellent question; it gets to the heart of a lot of this. I can tell you that, at the beginning, I used to end my talks with a precariously balanced kind of picture that suggested that we're going to find one bright balance point, a solid line where things are right o

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I disagree with that. We have a piece in impactethics.ca today that addresses that. Even when somebody is able to make a fully autonomous choice, if the assessor thinks they can do something that they can't, that's the problem. It's not about the autonomous choice of the patient

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  That's correct.

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I can, especially the two key issues that are problematic for MAID for sole mental illness. The first issue is how you predict irremediability, meaning that the person's condition will not get better. The second is how you supposedly separate suicidality—which benefits from suici

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  In the guidance they give, it is true that—

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Actually, it would also be even from the expert panel report. They do talk about how you should weigh the lengths of treatment, but they don't actually say how many treatments or the lengths or types you should have, which is very different than any other guidance we have, even o

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  —about a patient who got MAID while on a pass from psychiatric hospitalization, and the psychiatric team had not even known.

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I did not want the number of my download to be co-opted as a sign of readiness. That's happened in a previous committee.

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  I read the module.

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Yes, I do. I was quite disappointed that the data that would be valuable was not actually provided in the last report that came out, for the 2022 data. Despite that, there are signals in there that suggest signs of trouble for the expansion that's happening. I'm happy to elabo

Medical Assistance in Dying committee  Absolutely. The data collection right now to pick out marginalization.... This is what we're talking about. The idea that many people still get it for cancer and other things, that's true; but we're expanding it to allow other people to get it for all sorts of other reasons. If