44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 15, 2023 02:00PM
Mr. Speaker, I am presenting a petition in which the petitioners oppose Bill C-21 and are asking for it to be repealed because it would do nothing to prevent gun smuggling or crimes involving firearms.
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Madam Speaker, I am proud to rise on behalf of my compassionate and caring residents of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke. Like the majority of Canadians, my constituents strongly oppose state-sponsored suicide for those living with mental illness. That is why I will support the legislation to delay this from happening. This bill to delay providing assisted suicide is critical. It is a matter of life or death that this expansion be delayed.
Many Canadians are wondering, “How did we get here?” To describe this process as a slippery slope is to understate how greasy this rapid descent has been. How did we go from the Supreme Court reversing a precedent granting the right to die to those with incurable illnesses causing intolerable suffering and whose deaths are reasonably foreseeable to the point where the Quebec College of Physicians and Surgeons is advocating for the killing of newborn babies? How did we get here?
Obviously, first and foremost, the decision by the Supreme Court was to overturn the previous Supreme Court decisions and allow for a limited exception to the Criminal Code. The court found that the prohibition on assisted suicide is intended to protect vulnerable persons from being induced to die by suicide. The court ruled that the total ban on assisted suicide was overly broad because it also applied to non-vulnerable people and prevented them from receiving the assistance of a willing physician. The court said that it was up to Parliament to strike the right balance between Canadians suffering grievous and irremediable illness who want access to physician-assisted dying and those who may be put at risk by its legalization.
Then, Parliament debated legislation and Bill C-14 was passed in 2016. People whose deaths were reasonably foreseeable, meaning they were dying, and who were suffering intolerable pain could seek medical assistance. Despite widespread reservations, many Canadians view medical assistance in dying as compassionate.
Then, one judge said this was a violation of equality rights. The judge ruled that someone whose death was not reasonably foreseeable but who was suffering intolerable pain had the same right to assistance in dying. The progressive government did not appeal the case. It embraced the ruling and brought forth legislation to expand physician-assisted death to people who were not dying.
When that bill was before committee, the justice minister explained why physician-assisted suicide could not be expanded to include people whose sole condition was mental illness. The minister said there was no consensus. The bill then went to the Senate, where suddenly a secret consensus was discovered, unbeknownst to the medical community. The government flipped and flailed, and embraced this expansion to include mental illness.
The minister claimed the government would strike an expert panel to shape the necessary protocols to ensure that only the non-suicidal would be eligible for physician-assisted suicide. Last May, that expert panel returned with a protocol, albeit with two fewer members than when it started, after they resigned in protest. What did the expert panel have to say?
There is limited knowledge about the long-term prognosis for many conditions, and it is difficult, if not impossible, for clinicians to make accurate predictions about the future for an individual patient.
The expert panel, handpicked by the Liberal government, said it was impossible to make accurate predictions about future prognosis. Despite that admission, the Liberals still went ahead with recommending a protocol for allowing physician-assisted suicide for people whose sole condition is mental illness. The government claims it is listening to the experts, yet two of the experts on the panel resigned. They were prevented from providing a dissenting report. They are not the only experts speaking out.
I would encourage all my colleagues to get their hands on the article in the Globe and Mail, published last November, entitled “Canada will allow assisted dying for mental illness starting in March. Has there been enough time to get it right?”, written by Erin Anderssen. The article introduces readers to Dr. Madeline Li, a psychiatrist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Many of my colleagues here may remember Dr. Li from her appearance before the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying. While the article touches on a number of the regressive aspects of expanding assisted suicide, I feel this passage is particularly relevant to our conversation:
But among the many experts who have lined up to express their objections to the direction and pace of Canada’s euthanasia laws, Dr. Li’s deserves particular attention. She led the creation of MAID protocols at the University Health Network, a group of Toronto-area hospitals that together form the largest health research group in the country. At the national association for MAID providers, she is the scientific lead currently developing the government-funded assisted-dying curriculum for doctors. She has administered assisted deaths directly to patients, and provided oversight to hundreds of cases as the MAID program lead at the UHN.
All that experience, she said in an interview, has made her personally opposed to expanding MAID for patients without a foreseeable death, especially those with mental illness. The debate among doctors has become too ideological, she said, and the current system doesn’t have enough safeguards to prevent unconscious bias from factoring into decisions.
Can doctors—a mostly healthy, privileged group of people living in a society that routinely stigmatizes people with disabilities—objectively judge what makes life worth living? Dr. Li says she once watched a doctor use an actuarial chart to calculate that an older woman seeking MAID after a fall had, on average, three years left to live; he approved her for MAID, over the objections of three other physicians. “What if it had been six?” she asked. “How many years is enough?”
Dr. Li worries that since many psychiatrists won’t participate in MAID, there will be “an echo chamber of a few assessors who will all practice in the same way,” leaning hard toward patient autonomy. Already, she argues, MAID assessments are too often focused on whether a patient is eligible for an assisted death, rather than exploring why a patient wants to die in the first place.
The federal expert panel recommended that decisions should be made on a case-by-case basis, with the doctor and patient reaching a shared understanding. But while the law requires that patients must give “serious consideration” to clinically recommended treatments to relieve their suffering, they can refuse those treatments if they don’t deem them “acceptable.”
For instance, Dr. Li described the case of patient in his 30s, who asked for an assisted death, even though multiple doctors said his cancer was curable. Two assessors approved him for MAID. Faced with his adamant refusal to get treatment, and his progressing condition, Dr. Li said she helped him die “against her better judgment.” If MAID didn’t exist as an option, she believes he would have gotten treatment, and still be alive.
The government and its hand-picked experts assure us they can devise protocols rigorous enough to prevent vulnerable people from receiving assisted suicide. The expert panel says that despite it being impossible for doctors to predict a future prognosis of mental illness, Canadians should trust the opinion of doctors in making a determination of intolerable mental suffering, yet Dr. Li, against her better judgment, went ahead with assisting in the death of a man in his 30s who had a treatable cancer.
Unlike cancer, where we can have an objective test to determine a prognosis, we are supposed to just trust the opinion of doctors. Dr. Li was of the opinion the young man's death was not foreseeable. His condition was treatable, yet she assisted in his suicide. She is opposed to expanding this. How reluctant will physicians who support assisted suicide be when assessing people with mental illness?
Finally, while Dr. Li feels the debate has become too ideological, Canadians following the debate in this House might be confused. We have seen social Conservatives, small “L” liberals and socialists all raising serious concerns. We all seem to have the same goal of the maximum amount of compassion and care, while protecting the vulnerable.
I imagine there are about three million Canadians who grow angry hearing the Minister of Justice centre this debate on balancing the protection of vulnerable Canadians while preserving individual autonomy. On this issue, the minister seems to be more concerned with the autonomy of individuals to make their own medical determinations, while less concerned with the impact on vulnerable people.
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Madam Speaker, the question is whether we can get it right in a year. I have to ask this back: Can we ever get something like this right? It is incalculable that we have come so far. We have not gone down a slippery slope; we have jumped off a ledge.
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