- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $170,231.20
- Government Page
- Apr/30/24 4:38:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I do want to take this opportunity to congratulate my friend and fellow former Carleton alumnus on his by-election win and to wish him well in the upcoming Liberal leadership race; I think he would do better than some of the prospective contenders.
I want to ask the member a serious question. He spoke, toward the end of his comments, about mental health and about suicide prevention. As I understand it, it continues to be a policy of the government that it wants to pursue, at some point, the legalization of medically facilitated suicide for those with mental health challenges. Concurrently, the government continues to consider and to speculate about extending that regime to include minors. I know the member talked about reconciliation. Many indigenous leaders have spoken out against these proposals, as have many others. As a former teacher and a former principal, does the member agree with the government's intentions to eventually extend medically facilitated suicide to those struggling with mental health challenges?
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- Feb/15/24 1:56:36 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am struck with how, during this debate, we have heard so much technical and bureaucratic language from the government. It masks what is fundamentally an ethical and moral issue, that is, the just way to treat the most vulnerable within our society. This discourse about maybe we are not ready or maybe we will be ready masks the more important underlying question of whether we should ever have the state involved in facilitating the suicide of those with mental health challenges. On this side of the House, we say a firm no, not now, not ever.
I want to ask the member if he is concerned about the dramatic growth in the rates of those opting for MAID in Canada, opting for it perhaps under pressure or in other circumstances. We have seen, since this practice started in Canada, dramatic increases every single year. Is the member concerned about that, or is he totally fine with this idea of exponential growth in the rates?
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- Feb/13/24 9:13:11 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the fact the government had to put forward this legislation is a demonstration of its profound repeated failure on this file. Conservatives put forward a private member's bill, which was voted on in the fall, that would have forever killed this terrible idea of medically facilitated suicide for those with mental health challenges.
Government members, in the main, voted against that bill, and now they are coming back to the House. They have not learned the error of their ways. They do not recognize that, fundamentally, the medical system facilitating the suicide of those with depression and other mental health challenges is inconscionable. They have not realized that. Instead, they said that they just want a little more time to figure it out.
This is a terrible idea. It is never going to be a good idea, and they should have voted for the Conservative private member's bill to kill it when they had a chance. Nonetheless, we are ready to, after the next election, pass the legislation required to make sure this horrible idea never becomes a reality in Canada.
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- Feb/13/24 6:53:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, respectfully to my colleague, I have journeyed with close family members who have suffered significantly at the time of their death. I think one of the biggest challenges we see in this country, and members of the NDP have pointed this out in previous Parliaments, is a significant lack of proper training in pain management and proper available palliative care, as well as instances of people being actively pushed towards death by the system.
I am not worried about MAID being offered to everyone; euthanasia is not being offered to everyone. Euthanasia is being offered to certain people in certain situations, reflecting a social and political view of the value of their life. This is what the disability community has pushed Parliament to hear. When we offer suicide facilitation for people with disabilities and prevention for people without disabilities, that clearly sends the wrong message about valuing the universal value and dignity of all human life.
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- Feb/13/24 6:40:32 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Lethbridge.
In my still, as yet, relatively short parliamentary career, it has been necessary for me to address this dark subject of legalized medically facilitated killing well over a dozen times. When I was elected eight years ago, it was not legal, under any circumstance, for a doctor to kill, or to assist in the killing of, a patient. Prior to that time, when this issue had been brought to the House of Commons, proposals for the legalization of this sort of killing had been defeated by massive margins, with a majority of Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats opposing such changes, just eight short years ago.
I recall, as a young Conservative staffer in 2009, hearing and reflecting on the wise words of former NDP MP Joe Comartin, who told the House the following on October 2 of that year. He said:
I have spoken to Carol Derbyshire, who is the head of the hospice. She said the hospice does not get requests for assisted suicide. They provide the care, not just to the patient but to the family. She was very clear on that. She has seen any number of surveys that say one of the major reasons, aside from pain, that people want assisted suicide in their regime is that they do not want to be a burden on their family, their society, their community. If we can build that system to make sure they do not have to be concerned about that, we take away any desire to terminate their lives arbitrarily and at an earlier date than would be natural.
We need to look at our system right now.... At this point, approximately 20% of our population is covered by meaningful palliative care, hospice and a home care system. That is all we have in the country. Then there is another 15% or maybe 17% who are covered by partial assistance at the end of life.
This former NDP MP foresaw how requests for premature death would emerge not primarily from some fixed and deeply held desire to die, but from a social, cultural and political context in which people in pain are either invited to stay or invited to leave and in which people are offered the support to stay or not. We are all social beings, and our exercise of autonomy happens in a social context. The current context is one of increasing atomization and division, economic failures leading to immense affordability challenges and a kind of moral chaos resulting from the common lack of constructive frameworks for finding meaning and purpose in life.
The touchstones of connection, happiness and meaning are eroding. This leads to an increasing demand for government services that will, it is hoped, fill the gap left by declining community and family and that will provide people with support in finding connection, happiness and meaning when they are lacking. As these supports are never available from the state in ways that truly fulfill the desire for connection and community that we all have, the pain increases and leads more people to want to give up.
This has been the trajectory of our society recently, with the additional reality that COVID-era restrictions and polarization accelerated the breakdown of connection and community among many people. As more and more people want to give up, the legalization of medically facilitated death is presented as a solution at the end of the road. Over the last eight years, as more and more people have come to the end of that road, the numbers continue to go up exponentially. This is the social context driving the mental health crisis we have, to which euthanasia is now being offered as a solution.
In the speech from MP Comartin that I referred to, he also observed how a lack of proper training and emphasis on effective pain management meant that existing tools and technologies were not being deployed to relieve pain, even in the many cases where such relief was possible. He predicted, again correctly, that the legalization of euthanasia would lead to less attention to pain relief and thus further tilting the decision-making playing field away from life and toward death. That is exactly what we are seeing.
John Paul II posited in the 1990s:
[The] reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable “culture of death”. This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency. Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favoured tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of “conspiracy against life” is unleashed. This conspiracy involves not only individuals in their personal, family or group relationships, but goes far beyond, to the point of damaging and distorting, at the international level, relations between peoples and States.
Eight years on, we are sadly seeing the flower of this predicted culture of death. We hear proposals for the killing of children, even babies, and for the killing of those with depression and other mental health challenges. We have heard many testimonies of people who have been called selfish for wanting to remain alive in a situation where they require the care and support of others.
We are seeing the lives of those with disabilities, those facing homelessness and others facing pain and suffering devalued at the social, institutional and political levels. We see the manifesting of this war of the powerful against the weak, insofar as suicide prevention is offered to some, while suicide facilitation is offered to others, depending on pre-existing power and privilege.
Proponents of euthanasia have never said that all people who want to die should be able to choose to die. Rather, they have said that certain kinds of people should be helped to die, while other kinds of people should be helped to live. This differential treatment of different people necessarily informs the social context in which people feel loved, included and happy, or not.
Eight years on, Canada’s experiment with medically facilitated killing has failed. I will leave it to another time to consider whether it could have succeeded. Some will argue that it would have been possible to legalize euthanasia without unleashing the kind of ever-expanding culture of death that we see proposed. However, what is clear, at least in the context of our own experience, is that medically-facilitated killing has a taken on a kind of self-reinforcing logic that leads to constant expansion, a devaluing of the lives of the most vulnerable and eroding public and community support for the things that would actually improve the quality of life of those who suffer.
One effect of this culture of death is that people in vulnerable situations actually fear interactions with the medical system because they do not want to be pressured toward suicide in a moment of weakness or vulnerability. I have specifically heard this concern, even now from people facing acute mental pain, that they do not want to seek help in many contexts because they are looking for life and dignity-affirming help, and they are afraid the so-called care they might receive would take the form of pressuring them toward an early exit.
This is part of the reason Conservatives support the protection of conscience for individual medical practitioners and institutions. It is not just for the sake of the provider, but also for the sake of the patient, who should at least have the freedom to opt to access health care in a life and dignity-affirming environment, where they can be confident that they will not be pressured or even offered premature death. Understandably, many of those who are in a vulnerable state do not wish to even be offered such things, since the affirmation of life and meaning is an essential part of the proper course of treatment for those facing mental health challenges.
After eight years, it is important that we stop and take stock of how much has changed, lest we forget that political choices have profound consequences and also that political choices, once made, can still be at least partially unmade. I am reminded of this every time I talk to a legislator in another country about Canada’s euthanasia regime. Legislators in other western democratic countries, including many from the left, are for the most part horrified by the present reality of euthanasia in Canada.
One British legislator told their House of Commons the following:
...turning to the example of Canada across the pond, Living and Dying Well also found that clinicians reported five specific issues surrounding legalisation, including that it complicates the management of pre-existing symptoms; adversely impacts the important doctor-patient relationship; causes tension for families during what is often an already deeply challenging period; diverts resources away from crucial palliative care services; and confuses patients as to the nature and purpose of palliative care. When considered as a whole, those issues reported by practising clinicians in Canada are not something that we as lawmakers can or should overlook, and I believe that the highlighted impacts on palliative care provision are of particular concern.
Why are concerns about Canada’s emergent culture of death not as well known or discussed in the Canadian House of Commons or in Canadian society as they are in the British House of Commons or in other countries? Here, I do want to point the finger specifically at our state-funded media, the CBC.
I am most enthusiastic about our Conservative commitment to defund the CBC because of the shameless way that this organization uses its funded and privileged position to push stories that glorify euthanasia, while ignoring the pain and suffering of those whose experiences the CBC does not want to share. Good ideas win fair debates, and my constituents should not be forced to give over a billion dollars every year to an organization that desperately hunts for stories aimed at masking the dark realities of medically facilitated killing and suicide.
Canada was not this way eight years ago, and fortunately, Canada will not be this way forever. The end of this fanatically pro-euthanasia pro-death government is now more than reasonably foreseeable. A Conservative government would forever dispense with this lingering proposed legalization of medically facilitated suicide for those with mental health challenges. We would turn hurt into hope. We would stand with the most vulnerable and work to revive the structures of family and community that advance connection, happiness and meaning. We would celebrate life instead of death for all, not just for the privileged.
For nations and for people there is always hope. “For the wretched of the earth, there is a flame that never dies. Even the darkest nights will end and the sun will rise.”
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- Feb/13/24 6:37:12 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, one striking thing about this debate, for me, is that no advocate of legalized or expanded euthanasia says that everybody should be able to access this thing because they want it. Rather, what advocates say is that people in certain situations should be able to access it. For instance, they say that if an able-bodied person comes to a doctor and says, “I want you to help me end my life”, they are offered some kind of suicide prevention. However, if a person with a disability says, “In the context of my situation, I want to end my life”, they might be offered suicide facilitation.
This is not about a general policy of choice or autonomy, rather this is about saying that certain people who present with an apparent desire for death are treated one way and others are treated a different way. That raises a big problem in terms of how we value the lives of people with disabilities. I am curious to hear my colleague's response.
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Madam Speaker, the government has said that its approach is to try to eliminate from consideration those who are suicidal. In other words, those who are suicidal cannot have MAID, but those who are not suicidal can have MAID.
On the face of it, this does not make any sense, because by definition a person who is seeking suicide, facilitated through the medical system, is suicidal. The government is trying to make distinctions between concepts where no real distinctions exist.
The reality of the government's policy is that people who are experiencing suicidal thoughts and mental health challenges will be able to go to the medical system, and they will be facilitated in that by the medical system.
Would the member have a comment on the wordplay, the misrepresentation being used by the government to mask what is truly going to be the reality under its program?
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Madam Speaker, I have decided to share today for the first time the story of my young cousin Gabriel, who died by suicide on March 25, 2021. I hope his story provides some comfort to others and sharpens our understanding about the impact of the government’s proposal to legalize suicide for those with mental health challenges.
Gabriel was born here in Ontario, but spent most of his life in the United States. He had a loving and supportive family, which included three siblings, but he struggled throughout his life as a result of personal health circumstances that were generally hard to classify. He had Asperger’s syndrome and other things that affected the way he experienced the world. These health challenges made it difficult for him to form relationships with his peers and contributed to a sense of rejection and loneliness, but his family was always there for him, helping him work through the challenges and helping him to see his God-given dignity and purpose.
In conversations, my uncle has reflected on the contrast between Gabriel’s experience and that of his younger sister, Anastasia. Anastasia has Down syndrome. Society perceives her as having a disability. In fact, babies with Down syndrome face an extremely high abortion rate because our society fails to value people with Down syndrome, and also because it is poorly understood. Though perceived as having a visible disability, Anastasia is full of life, joy and happiness, which she effortlessly shares with all she encounters, especially those who are suffering. Gabriel, by contrast, did not look any different. He did not have an easily recognizable disability, but had immense pain that was largely invisible to the world around him.
I last saw Gabriel during a family road trip in 2019. At the time, he was working as an independent construction contractor and doing very well. However, as happened with many young small business owners, his business was hit hard by the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, even though he himself was not at great risk from the virus. In March of 2020, a lot of North America and the world shut down as a result of fears about this novel coronavirus. People died from the virus, but many also lost livelihoods and communities, as well as opportunities to engage in meaningful work, so many died by suicide, in proportions that we will never know precisely.
The current government chose these unusual circumstances as the time to push forward its radical agenda of legalization of medically facilitated suicide for those facing mental health challenges. It brought its new euthanasia law into force on March 17, 2021. This bill made changes to the euthanasia regime in Canada that were universally decried by the disability community.
As it relates to mental health, the bill contained a mechanism by which the prohibition on legalized medically facilitated suicide would automatically expire two years later, on March 17, 2023. Thus, the government legalized suicide for those with mental health challenges, but delayed the coming into force of that legalization until this year. Meanwhile, my cousin died by suicide eight days after the passage of the legislation, on March 25, 2021, just shy of his 26th birthday.
These events were not connected. My cousin was not following Canadian politics at the time and would not have seen our deliberations as being relevant to him where he lived. Nonetheless, as I got the call from my father in the lobby of this very chamber, I thought about the many people like Gabriel who will be affected by our work, the many people like Gabriel who live with unseen pain, have highs and lows, and are deeply loved by family and friends.
Until now, the message we have all sought to deliver to people like Gabriel is that they are loved and valued and that their lives are worth living. It has been famously said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” This insight was explored in depth by the great psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor Dr. Viktor Frankl. Frankl observed and reflected on the circumstances of his fellow prisoners and came to realize how important meaning is to human life.
Human beings are highly adaptable to circumstances, even when those circumstances involve extreme pain. Their ability to endure that pain hinges on their sense of meaning and purpose. I say it again, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Frankl developed a psychological method called “logotherapy” out of this insight, meaning that, in a therapeutic context, helping people develop an understanding of their purpose and their meaning provides the critical ingredient for happiness, even happiness in spite of pain.
For someone suffering from physical or mental health challenges, there is the immediate treatment or therapy they receive, but there is also the larger social context that shapes their ability to see meaning and value in their life in the midst of suffering. I think colleagues here will identify with the fact that, when someone in our family is suffering from mental health challenges, we seek to help them reduce or eliminate their pain, but we also seek to show them that their life has value and meaning in the midst of that pain.
The problem is that we now live in a society that increasingly misidentifies the meaning of life as being the avoidance of pain. We follow Bentham in thinking that happiness is simply the maximization of pleasure over pain, instead of appreciating the historically much more common insight that happiness consists in the life well lived and the life lived in accordance with meaning and purpose.
Today, many people think that there is no point in living if one suffers, whereas in the past it would have been universally accepted that a person can live a good, meaningful and even happy life that includes a measure of suffering and pain. If we, as a people, come to define meaning and happiness as the avoidance of pain, then we contribute to a loss of hope for people like my cousin. He can live a good life if he is able to believe that his life has value and meaning in spite of his pain. However, if he is made to believe that the good life consists solely in the avoidance of pain, then he must endure both the pain of the moment and the loss of perceived purpose and value. The combination of pain with a loss of purpose is likely always a cross too heavy to bear.
My uncle told me that his message to Gabriel was always “We'll get through this; we'll figure this out.” Gabriel's family sought to push back against the idea that an early death was inevitable for someone like Gabriel, showing him that a good life was possible and that obstacles could be overcome.
However, when legislators endorse medically facilitated suicide for those who are grappling with questions of purpose and meaning in the midst of great pain and suffering, we send them the message that their life is not worth living and we undermine their pursuit of meaning in the midst of that suffering. When doctors or when employees at Veterans Affairs Canada put suicide on the table as a way out, then they sharply send the message to the sufferer that maybe their life is not worth living or that early death is inevitable because of what they're going through.
Today, I would like to send a different message. I would like to say to the Gabriels of the world that they are loved, they are valued and their suffering and pain do not rob them of their essential human dignity or their ability to live out a noble purpose in the world. I want to send that message because it is true, but also because it is therapeutically useful, so that all those who are looking for meaning in their life can know that such meaning can be found even in the midst of pain. Notwithstanding the government's position, I hope that my statement today does send that message.
I know that the government's response to this is to suggest that there is some sharp moral and legal line between suicide on one hand and MAID on the other, with MAID or “medical assistance in dying” being the uniquely Canadian and politically manufactured term for when a medical professional intentionally kills a patient. Is MAID for a person with mental health challenges the same thing as suicide? Of course it is. The only difference is that the actual pulling of the trigger is done by someone else. It is suicide with an accomplice. Is MAID available to the suicidal? Either MAID is for those who want it or it is for those who do not want it. Assuming that MAID is still supposed to be only for those who request it, and since the term “suicidal” literally means “desiring suicide”, then MAID is for, and only for, those who are suicidal, by definition.
The minister responsible for mental health recently told the House, “All of the assessors and providers of MAID are purposely trained to eliminate people who are suicidal.” Perhaps her use of the term “eliminate” was a Freudian slip, but if she means that those who are suicidal are not eligible for MAID, then who in the world is eligible for MAID? Is it the non-suicidal? It becomes evident, when one provides simple definitions for the words being used, that so-called MAID is the same as medically facilitated suicide, and therefore that the policy of the government is to have the medical system offer to facilitate the suicide of those who are experiencing suicidality as a result of mental health challenges. Such an offer fundamentally changes the message that those suffering will receive from society about the meaning and value of their lives.
Specifically, the House is today debating Bill C-39, a bill that would extend the coming into force of this heinous reality for another year. I support Bill C-39, because I will support any measure that further delays the coming into force of this horror. Conservatives believe that this should be delayed indefinitely. In the meantime, we will vote for the legislation in front of us. Who knows? Perhaps the extra year will mean an election and a chance to euthanize this grievous and irremediable proposal once and for all.
Finally, I know that many members of the government share my opposition to the proposal, at least privately. I spoke earlier about the work of Viktor Frankl. In his work on logotherapy, he outlined how moral distress can be detrimental to a person's mental health. He tells the story of one patient who experienced great moral distress because of things he was asked to do at his job. His psychiatrist had for years been working with him on a complicated regimen that involved the re-evaluation of events in his childhood. Frankl himself told his patient to just get a new job, which solved the problem entirely.
To those experiencing moral distress, they should not over-complicate a simple matter. They will lose their sense of self and their own sense of meaning in life if they sacrifice their moral judgment to a fanatical justice minister. Please stand for what is right. For the Gabriels of the world, there is too much at stake.
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- Oct/18/22 1:18:37 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-7
Madam Speaker, the next petition raises concerns with respect to Bill C-7 from the last Parliament and the fact that the bill would allow euthanasia for those with a mental illness as their sole medical condition.
This petition quotes the Canadian Mental Health Association in saying that CMHA does not believe that mental illnesses are irremediable and it supports recovery. Petitioners also note that suicide is the second leading cause of death for Canadians between the ages of 10 and 19. Petitioners call on the government to reject proposals to allow euthanasia in cases where mental health is the sole condition at play and further to protect Canadians struggling with mental health challenges and facilitate treatment and recovery for them as opposed to death.
I think I will leave it there for the present.
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Madam Speaker, I will continue to exercise the rights I am given by the House to speak about this pertinent issue, which fundamentally relates to this legislation.
The government does not want to hear the many concerns raised by Canadians living with disabilities. This is critically linked to their quality of life. The structures the government has put in place are denying vital supports to Canadians who need them and pushing them toward this widening door the government has offered when it comes to facilitated suicide.
Again, the minister said, “I regularly hear from families who are appalled by the fact that they take their child, potentially their older child and are offered unprovoked MAID. I think that has to stop.”
Of course, the government wants to go even further. Next year in March, euthanasia for those with depression or other mental health challenges will become explicitly legal and the government is now studying euthanasia for children. In a world imagined by the current trajectory, a parent could bring a teenager suffering from depression to a counsellor and find that the teenager is being offered suicide facilitation instead of suicide prevention support.
Recently, Dr. Louis Roy from the Quebec College of Physicians recommended that euthanasia be legalized for infants with certain disabilities. Imagine that someone would actually come to a parliamentary committee in Canada and recommend the killing of young children because of their disability. So much for autonomy. I hope the government would have denounced the vile views expressed by Mr. Roy, but it has not so far.
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- Mar/23/22 3:47:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the next petition highlights concerns about the government's decision to allow facilitated suicide within the medical system for those struggling with mental health challenges. The petitioners note that the Canadian Mental Health Association says it “does not believe that mental illnesses are irremediable”. They call on the Government of Canada to repeal euthanasia where mental illness is a sole condition, and protect Canadians struggling with mental illness by facilitating treatment and recovery, not death.
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