44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 13, 2023 11:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I do not want to get into petty politics. I am not saying that my colleague's question is at that level, but I do not want to get into that.
What I want to say, however, is that we can see the shortcut that my Conservative colleagues sometimes take when they speak. They act like MAID is the only choice, but that is not true. A person can die a natural death without any problems. MAID is only morally acceptable if, and only if, it is voluntary, period.
I want all my colleagues to feel well supported in dying, because that is what palliative care actually is: support for people who are dying. I hope that as each of them lies on their deathbed, they are able to wake up one morning and feel completely at peace and ready to go, rather than lingering in agony. I hope they will be able to benefit from MAID. That is the best we can hope for for any human being: to depart this life in peace.
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Madam Speaker, I was very surprised listening to my colleague talking about the numbers they have. In 2016 there were 1,200 cases of MAID. That doubled in 2017 and doubled again in 2018. It was over 10,000 in 2021. That is nearly 30 people dying in this country every single day. That is more than double all the deaths from breast cancer or all the suicides in this country. We were promised a process to make sure we were not implementing a regime that was doing this without really strong checks and balances.
I find it staggering that the member could say this thing is working when we see such massive increases, much higher than in Europe or anywhere else, in medically assisted death in this country.
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Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-39, an act to amend the Criminal Code with regard to medical assistance in dying. It is a bill I will be supporting to protect the most vulnerable Canadians from the Liberal government's reckless expansion of medical assistance in dying to Canadians who are suffering solely from a mental illness.
Unbelievably, if Bill C-39 does not pass, Canadians struggling with a mental disorder or illness will be able to access MAID as early as next month. As the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention said, “Just as life is getting harder in Canada, it is getting easier to die.”
It is important to be perfectly clear that when considering MAID in the context of someone who is not dying as a result of their condition, such as a mental disorder alone, we are talking about suicide. It is almost as if the Liberals have given up. Instead of protecting the most vulnerable in society, they have opted for the easy way out. They have chosen a dangerous path, a slippery slope. They have opened medical assistance in dying to the most vulnerable in our society, and now they want to stop the clock, buy more time and find another politically expedient reprieve without doing anything to help.
I listened intently to the debate today, and honestly, it almost makes me ashamed to be a politician. Earlier today, the minister said that we need more time. Yes, we do. I have said this since the very first debate we had on MAID in 2016. During my intervention back then, I said as a new member of Parliament that nothing prepares one to adequately debate or intervene on such a weighty issue. We need to ensure we get this right, yet the Liberals rushed it through.
We have all heard very real stories: an Ontario man requesting MAID because it was more preferable than being homeless, the woman who has applied for MAID after seven years of not finding affordable housing and Canadians accessing food banks and asking for help with MAID. More and more Canadians are struggling, and we should be doing everything to support them, not giving up on them. We have also heard the unbelievable stories of Veterans Affairs employees suggesting MAID to veterans who are struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. These are real stories; they are not sensationalism.
As the Canadian Mental Health Association has said, “Canada is failing to meet its human rights obligations when [Canadians] with a mental illness cannot receive the programs, supports and resources they need to be well and live with dignity.” The government is failing to provide even the most basic programs and supports.
This is a topic that my constituents feel very strongly about. It is a divisive topic, to say the least, and I respect people's decisions, but one thing is clear: A majority of my constituents, and indeed Canadians all across our beautiful country, are against the expansion of MAID for Canadians solely dealing with mental illness or disorders.
Canadians need to know what we are fighting for today. We need to look beyond what we are debating. The simplicity of Bill C-39 is a contradiction to the complexity of the issue. What we are really talking about is the ability for those suffering with mental illness to end their lives. Instead, we should be here today talking about what we can do to help those in need and what we can do to provide the services that will save lives.
Earlier today and throughout the debate, the Liberals have tried to explain away the provisions that included mental illness in MAID. They have attempted to shift the focus from what is actually happening to what is politically expedient, with the exception of our hon. colleague from Thunder Bay—Rainy River, whose speech I truly appreciated. Instead of addressing the issue head-on, they are looking for us as parliamentarians to buy more time to find a soft landing.
I will be voting in favour of Bill C-39, but I cannot support the addition of suicide to MAID ever. Let us be honest that this is exactly what we are talking about. There are times when partisan politics are called for and this not one of those times. We can disagree on tax hikes, we can disagree on gun legislation and we can disagree on who is best prepared to move our country forward. However, we cannot disagree on the importance of life and the importance of fighting for those who are struggling and who believe their only way out of the hardship they are experiencing is death. Is that not what we are here for? Is that not what all of us, all 338 members of Parliament, ran on? Was it not to stand up for those who are struggling, Canadians from coast to coast?
We need to be doing everything we can to make sure we are helping those who are struggling and who are the most vulnerable. We should be focused on offering help and treatment rather than assisted death.
Just two short years ago, all members of the House stood and voted in favour of creating an easy to remember three-digit suicide prevention hotline. It has been a long road forward, but this fall, Canadians who find themselves in trouble will have a chance to get the help they need. When seconds matter, they will not be forced to google a 10-digit number. They will simply pick up their phone to dial or text 988, and they will be able to talk to a person to start the process to get help.
The 988 hotline will not be the end point. It will be the beginning. It will provide one more tool with which those who are suffering can reach out for help.
As many of my colleagues know, I have dedicated my life to fighting for those who suffer silently or struggle with mental illness. I have sat with so many families devastated by suicide whose only hope is that we do everything in the House to ensure other families never experience what their families have. There is so much pain and so much guilt. Through my work, I have met many who have struggled with mental illness or mental injury due to their service.
I think about my friends. Jason is a giant of a man who was a firefighter. He was gripped with PTSD and wanted to die by suicide, but instead, he chose life. Now he helps others on their journey to beat PTSD and OSI. My friend Kent continues to serve our community each and every day. I think about their families every day and how I am so thankful my friends chose life.
I think about my own life and how at one point, I was struggling. It was one intervention, one by chance intervention that made me chose life. When someone is struggling with a mental injury, it is sometimes tough to see the forest through the trees. Sometimes people cannot see the light through the darkness. Sometimes people just need someone to tell them they are fighting for them and to help them get the assistance they need.
I live every day to fight for those who are struggling. We need to be doing everything we possibly can to make lives easier for Canadians, to give hope when it seems there is none. We need the government to be working with stakeholders to find the means to support those with mental illness. We have spent far too long talking about it. We have spent far too much time on studies that sit on shelves somewhere and gather dust. We have spent far too long doing nothing.
I will be supporting this legislation, but I will never support the inclusion of mental illness in MAID. It is a slippery slope. We need to take the next year or longer, find out how we can provide real support and figure out where we can actually make a difference. We need to spend the next year at least working on solutions that will keep Canadians alive.
A few weeks ago, I had a meeting with a man whose young daughter had ended her life by suicide. We spoke over Zoom for almost an hour, and I listened to his story. I heard the grief. I heard the despair, and I heard the regret.
Those who have children know what I am talking about. We live our lives to make our children’s lives better. We want the world for them. We want to give our kids everything we never had. We want this place to be better for them, and we want them to know we care.
What I heard in that man’s voice was utterly devastating. It was heart-wrenching. He said to me, “Todd, I can live with the death of my daughter, but thinking of what she had to go through, how many hoops she had to jump through just to access help, and how she had to navigate her crisis all alone is unbearable.” He said that he can live with the death of his daughter.
I honestly do not know how someone can listen to those words and think that what we are doing here is totally acceptable. I do not mean the year-long reprieve the government wants us to support. I mean the fact that we are even at this point, having this discussion. Until we have provided every support, exhausted every means, done everything we possibly can to help someone through their pain and suffering, my God, how can we even be here talking about this? The impact of that meeting will live on with me forever: the pain in his voice, the hurt, and the image of his daughter reaching out for help that was not available.
Conservatives do not believe that medical assistance in death is an acceptable solution to mental illness and psychological suffering. Our health care system should help people find the hope that they need to live, not assist in their deaths.
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Madam Speaker, it is always an honour to rise in the chamber. We have been discussing very profound issues today, perhaps some of the most profound issues we can ever discuss in Parliament, which are life and death. We are discussing the deaths of loved ones and the deaths of those who have no one to love them, yet this is all happening in the context of Bill C-39, which absolutely fails the test of profundity because it is a last-minute scramble. It is a papering over of an absolute failure to deal with something that should have been dealt with from the beginning, and the government continues to drop the ball, so I am going to speak a bit on how we got here.
It is really important in this debate to be careful with the language we use and to be careful with each other. I have heard it alluded to that this was some kind of Nazi regime, which is ridiculous. I have heard people talk about being loved and other people saying that we are not respecting rights. We are talking about the most intimate acts that a human experiences: birth and death.
It may sound odd to say that death is an intimate act. Death can be very traumatic. Death can be violent. Death can really tear families apart, but it can also bring families together. It is those moments of how we confront death and value death that really show who we are as a society. I am thinking right now of my sister Kathleen, who never made it out of her 50s. This week would have been her birthday. Nobody got a rawer deal in life than my sister. She got the bad end of the cards dealt to her every single time, and Doc Holliday had nothing on her when it came to facing down death.
I remember, as she was dying, that every morning she insisted that she look good, and her back was disintegrating from the cancer. One of us got the nerve to ask her about MAID. Man, she almost bit our heads off because that will to live, the will to be there one more day through the pain, was very, very profound.
I remember we sent her off singing Danny Boy because that is how we say goodbye. That is how we said goodbye to her husband when he died just before her, and to my dad and to my grandfather. Those are intimate moments. However, her death, and a natural death it was, was not somehow superior to those of people who have chosen MAID.
I think of my friend Liz from Vancouver Island. Wow, she was a force. She called me and said, “I can't live with the pain anymore and I'm choosing the date.” I spoke to her the day before she went. I had a sense that this was also a very profound moment.
I think of my friend Craig from CBC. I followed his last two weeks on Facebook because he posted every day. It was a very powerful thing to see someone choose that moment and choose how they were going to tell their story in those final two weeks.
We have to respect the choices that people make. The provision for MAID that was brought in was about ensuring that a fundamental respect was given. However, the flaw goes back to the fact that we are not just individuals. We are not just individuals with rights. We are brothers, fathers, uncles, sisters, aunts. We have come from family, and family is part of it because death without family is traumatic. That is a tearing apart.
We come from communities and a death in our community can be traumatic if we are not part of it. We come from neighbourhoods. I think of my father when he died, and he lived up in a townhouse project in north Scarborough. The neighbours were coming all hours of the day and night. They were Sri Lankan, Italian and South Asian families who could not speak English but who would say, “We brought food for Mr. John”, because he was part of the neighbourhood.
Those moments of death are about our involvement with each other, and what concerns me with the changes that have been suggested to MAID, is that it is about separating those who are vulnerable, those who are isolated and those with mental distress from the larger community, which needs to hold them and care for them. We as legislators cannot just say that it is an individual choice. This is a societal choice we are making, and we are making it now on behalf of very vulnerable people who need our back.
We cannot just say, “They are depressed. They have always been depressed. It is their right. They are individuals.” That is a failure of our obligation to be there as a neighbourhood, as a community, as a family to hold them and to get them through the darkness.
How did we get here? There is a lot of blame, enough to go around. We knew that the issue of medical assistance in dying was fundamentally an issue that Parliament had to confront. This was our job as legislators. It was a hard job, but it was our job. The Stephen Harper government just decided to ignore it. It did nothing on this, even though we all knew it was coming.
Then the Carter decision came down. The Supreme Court stepped in. I think it was a failure for the court to step in and do the job parliamentarians should have done. What it did was put a timeline, because it said it did not have faith in Parliament. I think it was also a mistake that the Supreme Court put such a short timeline, because these were profound decisions we were making.
Then, the original bill passed. I had a lot of questions about that bill. I had real concerns about what the protections were and how it would be implemented. When we talk about someone whose death is foreseeable, who is suffering from pain they cannot deal with it, how do we make sure that the legislation is not opening the door to something much broader? We were told at the time as parliamentarians to vote for the legislation and that we would have a review. I trusted that. I thought it was fair. I had a lot of questions, but I recognized there were legal obligations. We had the Supreme Court's ruling and Parliament would have a chance to look at this. We were never given that opportunity. Parliament was never given the right to see the effects of the legislation we brought in.
Then the Truchon decision came in, where a Quebec court said that, with the charter provisions, limiting it to a foreseeable death was not fair and we had to throw the legislation out. That was a time when I think it would have been reasonable for the federal government to bring that to the Supreme Court and ask for a review. It did not do that. It accepted it. I think of how many decisions went in favour of indigenous communities and the government went all the way to the Supreme Court every single time, but on the Truchon decision it did not. That was another opportunity for it to say that the legislation was being expanded, perhaps for good, perhaps for bad, and that it needed to be reviewed. Still, Parliament did not get the chance to do the review.
Then it went to the Senate, of all places, the unelected, unaccountable Senate. These are people who cannot be fired once they hired. They can do whatever they want. They can show up or not show up. They sent us back a bill that said they wanted Parliament, the elected members, to approve their change, which was that if people are depressed they should be able to die.
The government should have rejected that bill outright. It should have told the senators that, number one, they are not elected, not accountable, and that it was a ridiculous provision. It did not, so the bill sat on the Attorney General's desk, to come into effect this coming St. Patrick's Day. Now we are scrambling. We have to deal with this bill. It is not that we are responding to the bill; we are putting it off for another year.
I will support that, but I think it is a complete failure of our obligation to deal with something that needs to be reflected on and needs a profound answer from parliamentarians. It needs for us to stand up and ask what is right, what is fair and what provisions have to be in place to protect the vulnerable, particularly those who, in a moment of darkness, think they want to end their life.
I looked at the statistics of how MAID has been applied, and that alone would cause any parliamentarian to say that we should look at this. In 2016, 1,200 people died by MAID. It more than doubled in 2017. It more than doubled again in 2018, to over 5,000, and to over 10,950 in 2021. That is 30 people every single day in this country deciding to end their life.
That is double all the deaths from breast cancer in this nation. It is more than double the national suicide rate, and we are not going to reflect and say, wait a minute, is this opening the door to a place where we should not have gone, and where none of us thought we were going, when more than double the deaths of what we see in the suicide epidemic in this country are from people going to the doctor and saying they just do not want to be here anymore?
We could be told that there are protections and measurements in place, and we have been told that. I heard that at all the hearings. Then we get examples. I do not want to wave around one example and say that this is proof of what went wrong and the perfidy of the government, but I look at an Associated Press article on Alan Nichols, who had a history of depression and mental illness, and the police brought him to the hospital because they were afraid that he was going to kill himself. His family said that we had to help him, that he had a history of mental illness. He decided to apply for MAID and he was dead. That is an outrage. His family was asking for help for him, but he was treated as an individual in his own right who could just come into the hospital, brought in by the police, who were trying to keep him alive.
I think of the suicide rates that we have had in the communities I represent. Some of the highest suicide rates in the world are in northern Canada, and we have done jack about that.
In 2019, I brought Motion No. 174 to this House, calling for a national suicide prevention action plan, and every single member of the House voted for that. I heard all the speeches, that we have to protect the vulnerable, that we are going to be there for them, that the government has a role to play. We voted for that, and nothing was done, nothing. People continue to die.
Now we have this panic legislation to say, oh my God, let us just put off for another year the fact that people just have to be depressed and they can walk in and say “I want to die” and we will let them die. One could be depressed for all manner of reasons. In Belgium, which had medically assisted suicide for many years, one can claim it for PTSD. My God, will PTSD be a reason for it? It could be depression, or injury at work. Yes, it is a crappy life to have serious chronic pain. It is going to be a crappy life, especially if people do not have a proper pension or a proper place to live, but they will be able to go, as an individual, and say “I want to die.” Are we going to let that happen on our watch? I do not think so.
Again, this is not about my moral choices over someone else's moral choices. This is about who we are as a society, whom we protect and whom we leave on the sidelines.
In Motion No. 174, to establish a national suicide prevention action plan, there were many factors that we brought in because we met with organizations across the country. We talked about what it would take to have a holistic life-supporting system for people in crisis. We talked about establishing national guidelines for best practices in suicide prevention based on the evidence and effectiveness, in a Canadian context. We said we would work to establish culturally appropriate community-based suicide prevention programs by the representative organizations of the Inuit, first nations and Métis people so that they would run the programs that work for them and they would be culturally appropriate.
We said we would create a national public health monitoring program for the prevention of suicide and the identification of groups at elevated risk. That is really important, because when we know where the elevated risks are, we know where to put resources. We talked about the creation of programs to identify and fill gaps in knowledge related to suicide and its prevention, including timely and accurate statistical data. Once again, if we do not know what the data looks like, we have no way to help. It is not the role of the government to go in and do emergency crisis prevention in every single case. That is not what we do, and we would be terrible at it, but it is that information, the analysis and being able to show where the shortfalls are that would allow funding to flow.
There would be the creation of a national online hub, providing essential information in assessing the programs in the various languages: English, French, indigenous and the other languages spoken in Canada. We would conduct, within 18 months, a comprehensive analysis of high-risk groups of people, the risk factors specific to each group, and the degree to which sexual abuse and other forms of childhood abuse and neglect have an impact on suicidal behaviour.
We would assess the barriers for Canadians in accessing appropriate and adequate health, wellness and recovery services, including substance use, addiction and bereavement services, and the funding arrangements required to provide treatment, education, professional training and other supports required to prevent suicide and assist those bereaved by a loved one's suicide. We would look at the use of culturally appropriate suicide prevention activities and best practices, and study the role social media plays with respect to suicide and suicide prevention.
If the government had done those things, then yes, it could come in and tell me it will pass this Senate bill allowing people who are mentally depressed to kill themselves. It could tell me that it has actually done the analysis and presented the information to Parliament, and then we would look at it and know where the gaps are. However, if the government has not done any of that work, it should not tell me that we are going to pass a bill that will let someone who has no support, no backup and no help say that life is tough and it is game over for them. This was the final thing we voted for in this Parliament. I know a lot of people were taking pictures and doing press releases about how great it was that they were standing up on suicide prevention.
There should be an annual report to Parliament on preparations for and implementation of the national action plan for suicide prevention, including data on progress over the previous year and a comprehensive statistical overview of suicide in Canada for the year. If we had done that in 2019, if we had four years of statistics, if we had facts and we knew where the mental health dollars needed to go, if we were not just putting it out willy-nilly but actually had statistics, then we could talk about maybe, in certain circumstances, after all these other areas have been exhausted and after all these other supports have failed, a person who may have no other choice. However, that person, in the midst of darkness today, has none of those other supports because nobody at the federal level bothered to put that in place. We have seen our provincial government fail in so many areas as well.
I was deeply concerned when I heard the Attorney General do a podcast on this legislation. He deliberately connected the change of MAID to the right to kill oneself. He said:
Remember that suicide generally is available to people. This is a group within the population [meaning the people who might need MAID] who, for physical and possibly mental reasons, can't make that choice to do it themselves. Ultimately, this provides a more humane way for them to make a decision they otherwise would have made if they were able in some other way.
That is the Attorney General of Canada saying they physically cannot do it, they might not be smart enough to do it and they might be too depressed, but they have a right to kill themselves. That is what he said on a podcast just recently.
When I am told we are going to delay this for a year, I will vote to delay it for a year, but I want to see a plan to address this. I want to see the statistics that prove how this is being used, whether it is being exploited and whether the vulnerable are being targeted or being led to use this because there are no other supports. Until that happens, the last thing we should do as a Parliament of Canada is open the door further for more people to die.
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Madam Speaker, the truth of the matter is that this issue exposed something that is happening in our society, and it is happening without oversight.
When the previous minister of justice indicated in the House that the first bill on assisted suicide, or MAID, had to be studied extensively before we moved forward with any other considerations, the government just flew right by that and immediately brought in another piece of legislation that, again, has opened it up.
I am sorry, but I do not know how much closer to death on demand it can get when a veteran is told that by someone. Yes, it was illegal, doing what they did to even suggest it because it was out of their purview. To open it up to that point is to say to someone, “You know what, with all of your issues, this would be a better alternative to your life.”
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