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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 283

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 15, 2024 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 283 - Feb/15/24
Mr. Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay, NDP)
  • Feb/15/24 11:55:00 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, as always, it is a great honour to rise in this House, as I have done many times over the past 20 years. I mention the 20-year mark because I have always been a great political optimist, a great believer in Canada and a believer in our fundamental goodness when it comes to working things out. However, we are in a very dark time for democracy. We see the rise of disinformation and social conflicts in all aspects of life. On the international stage, we see the uncertainty coming out of Putin's aggression and the mass killing of innocent people in Palestine. I do not feel that the House of Commons is rising to what Canadians expect us to be. Too often, we are dealing with very profound issues through glib press releases or slogans and bumper sticker politics. Every now and then we are confronted with legislation that forces us to go deeper, and this is certainly such a moment. There is nothing more profound in the human community than birth and death. How we address the rights of people as they are dying, as well as the supports that need to be in place, not only defines who we are as a society but also goes right down to who we are as families, as neighbours, as spouses, as parents and as children. We are in a very unfortunate moment in terms of the failure to put the guardrails in place to protect people at this most profound moment. The issue of MAID is very personal, and it is of societal importance that we get this right. I have certainly struggled with this issue. I wanted to make sure that what we did was done for the benefit of all, in the best interest of the human community, considering the right not only of the individual but also of the people who love them to be part of something special. I am coming up on the anniversary of my sister Kathleen's passing. Nobody blew through our family more like a summer storm than Kathleen, and I have never seen anybody suffer greater pain. She was fearless right until the very end. Kathleen was always wanting one more gathering, song or story. She would never have accepted MAID, because her will to live was so powerful even as she knew she was not going to live. I am not saying that her death was any more profound than anyone else's. How she went was her choice, as well as our choice. My mother said the rosary; I sang Danny Boy. That is how we do things in our family. We had one of those great Celtic wakes afterward. There were people there who had never even met my sister, but they all told stories about her. That is the way we do things in the Celtic tradition. I have also had friends, who had cancers they could not beat, phone me to say goodbye. MAID allowed them the opportunity to choose, with their family and their community, a dignified way to go. I respect that. It is a very profound choice. When Parliament was confronted with the need, because of the Supreme Court ruling, to put a regime in place, we did so and then said that there would be a review. We needed a review because we were going to a place we had never been to as a society. The review would happen after we saw how MAID was working. Was it working as it was supposed to? Were there abuses? Were the rigours that Parliament said had to be put in place not paid attention to? Then we had the Quebec Superior Court decision, the Truchon decision. I felt at that time that it was the obligation of the federal government to appeal. I am not going to argue the merits of the Truchon decision, but the obligation of the federal government was to make sure that, if we were to apply this at the national level, we had really done all the due diligence. That was not done. The Liberals moved a change to MAID before the review that was supposed to happen. Suddenly, things were already changing from what we had agreed on. Then it went to our colleagues in the Senate. I will never say much that is positive about the Senate, but today I will certainly say how dismal and appalling the attitudes of the senators were. Stan Kutcher, whom I had to sit with on the special committee, showed disrespect and arrogance. Senators, who are not elected, who have no accountability, who do not have to go back to their communities when they are dealing with a suicide crisis like I and other people have to, said that they wanted an arbitrary date to extend MAID to people suffering from mental illness and depression. That was an extraordinarily outrageous and poorly thought out overreach, and it was the job of the Parliament of Canada to simply say, no. All the other provisions of MAID would have stayed in place, but that did not happen. What happened was the Liberals agreed, and then it dawned on them that we were going down a very dangerous road and things had not been thought out. There is my colleague from Abbotsford, whom I have sat with on many committees. We probably disagree on a lot in politics, but we share the same integrity of coming to the House to do the right thing, bringing what we can bring to bear. He brought forward legislation to deal with this provision, and it was voted down. Therefore, we are now some 30 days from a profound change in legislation that would change Canada forever, and we are scrambling on a question of life, death and body autonomy. This is not how we should be dealing with these issues. I used the words “body autonomy”, because it is one of the profound human rights, the right to control one's body and the right to make a decision, but it is not an absolute right. There are societal factors that go into that right. When people are deeply depressed, when they are suffering mental illness and feel alone, their body autonomy has been compromised as has their ability to make decisions. It is really important for us to always remember that nobody dies alone. They may die in grief. They may die in isolation. They may die in the blackest hole of their personal pain, but the impacts of that death affect family, neighbours and people beyond what the poor person who suffered that dark moment could ever understand. If people have ever sat down and worked with people whose loved ones were lost to suicide, they want to say, again and again, “If only they had known how much they were loved.” In the northern communities I work in, children as young as 10 years old are giving up and killing themselves. What kind of nation sits back and lets children give up hope at age 10? I would have thought that when we had those kinds of suicide crises at Cross Lake, Attawapiskat, Pikangikum, and Wapekeka, and we cannot even mention how many of those communities have suffered, that there would have been a national consensus to look at what we needed to put in place, but that did not happen. When I sat on that special committee and heard some of the medical experts say that they were really pleased that the Liberal government had put in place all the steps necessary to help this through, it made me think that we were putting resources in place to push ahead the ability of people, who are severely depressed, to make a decision to die without getting a second opinion from their loved ones, their families or their spouses, even. The government would do that, but it would not put in place the broader supports we need for mental illness. This is not a whataboutism issue; this is about the crisis we are facing, with 4,000 suicide deaths a year. The mental health crisis is extreme. In 2016, I brought forward the national palliative care strategy, because it is not applied fairly across the country. When we cannot die in dignity, it is a terrible thing. We have talked with doctors and nurses across the country about the palliative care approach. The federal government agreed and said it would put a strategy in place, that it would work with the provinces and territories, yet nothing was done. In 2019, I brought Motion No. 174 on a national suicide prevention plan, which was based on the incredible work that was done in Nunavut. We know that Quebec put a suicide prevention plan in place and cut the suicide rate by 50%. Once one starts to map it out, these factors are not difficult to find, the patterns of where those suicide clusters form, with respect to areas of age and economic crisis. That was part of what the suicide action plan would be. Parliament would provide the resources so we could to start to map out where these crises occurred and put the mental health services in place. We need to be doing that as a Parliament instead of scrambling at the eleventh hour to come up with a fix, a temporary fix, another temporary fix on a temporary fix, on a decision that was put forward by a non-elected, unaccountable Senate, which had no backing, no credibility and no support, other than the fact that a couple of arrogant senators, who have never been elected and have no accountability, decided that Parliament would go along with this, and the government put up with that. It was an absolute failure of public policy, to unelected senators like Pamela Wallin and Stan Kutcher dictate health policy for people in crisis. We would never allow that for anything else, yet here we are, 30 days from the deadline. We have had letters telling us not to do this. Seven out of 10 provinces say to not do this. We had the medical community saying that it had no way to even properly assess and not do this. We have had really profound, thoughtful witnesses come forward to talk about the complexities of the issues of mental illness. Who is one to say whether it is irredeemable? Who is one to say that this suffering is so bad that it warrants death, when there are options? We also have the issue of people in increasingly desperate situations, who feel alone. It tells us who we are as a society when we say that it is really too bad that one is homeless. It is really too bad that one is suffering the nightmare of addiction. It is really too bad that there are young people in a northern indigenous community and they have never, ever been able to get proper medical attention. However, if they want to die, we will set up a process. MAID was not meant for that. MAID was meant to deal with people who could make the choice, an informed adult choice as they suffered pain that would not go away, with their loved ones and their families. I remember when my good friend Liz from Vancouver Island called me. We were good friends. She used to drive me around Vancouver Island in this old Jaguar with wood panelling that she got for $4,000. I kept saying, “Liz, if this car breaks down on the mountains, I'm not going to have to get out to push it to the other side am I?” Liz played blues music for me in the car. She talked about the Catholic saints and about queer politics. She was her own person, and she smoked. As she was dying, she called me and said that this was the moment, that she was taking the moment because this was the last one she may have to make that decision. It was a very profound way to go. MAID is for that. MAID is not for people who feel they have no hope, without a back-up, without a robust, multidisciplinary team to walk the issues through with them. It is not something they can make a second choice. I think of Dr. Valorie Masuda, a palliative care physician, who said to the committee: If this special joint committee on MAID recommends proceeding with allowing access to MAID for chronic mental conditions, I would recommend that there be a robust, multidisciplinary review process involving physicians, psychiatrists, social workers and ethicists involved in a patient's MAID application, and that there be a transparent review of MAID cases shared between health authorities and provincial and federal oversight so that we ensure we are not treating social problems with euthanasia. Imagine if someone with mental illness and depression were able to get a multidisciplinary team of physicians, psychiatrists, social workers and ethicists, we would not have a mental health crisis. Those people are not there. Those teams are not there. The government made a commitment to transfer $4.5 billion for mental health to the provinces to deal with the crisis that is unfolding before us, but it has not done that. Therefore, again, we are in a situation where we are being asked to vote. The bill that the Liberals have brought forward is gutless, because it will punt this down the road for three years, and we will be back at it in three years. We had punted it down the road for a year over the fundamental failure of the former attorney general who simply let it pass. However, the Senate made a completely unreasonable, undemocratic and unwise pronouncement that overrode the work of the democratically-elected House, a House whose members, as dismal as we are sometimes, dumbed-down, sloganeering and fighting over the stupidest things, have to go back to our constituents and talk to them. We have had to go the funerals of people who have died from suicide because of depression. We bring that experience into the House. We can disagree on the extent of MAID, we can disagree on many things, but we have a democratic right and a duty to do the right thing here. The Senate has no democratic accountability to anyone. Therefore, the fact that we are having to pick up the pieces from its arrogance and the failure of the Liberal government to hold it to account is concerning. We need to reflect on that. I would urge the members in the other chamber to not play games with this. On March 17, the deadline changes, the law of Canada changes, and the amount of people who could die without proper support would change. It would change forever the legal framework of Canada. My message to those unelected senators is not to play games with the work we are doing. We are picking up the pieces. We are trying to fix the damage they did, and we need to do so this, because a bigger principle is at stake, the stake of human dignity in a country. We have to also extend this conversation to our ongoing failure as a nation on mental health; our ongoing failure to offer young people a better future; and our ongoing failure to recognize that if the weakest people in our society are allowed to kill themselves because there is no hope, then we have failed, and we are failing. I would like to think that we can come together across party lines to say that there has to be guardrails that protect the autonomy of the individual, and also places individuals who are in mental crisis and depression within the context of their family, their loved ones and their society. When one dies alone and in darkness, the effects are felt for years and years after. Going into some communities after a suicide crisis is like walking into shockwaves of grief that play out for years and years to come, and it takes so much work to come back from that for a community, for a family. Here we are as a society making that decision. Therefore, let us do this right and let us do this with respect for the people who expect us to do the right thing.
2751 words
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