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Decentralized Democracy

Member of Parliament

Corey Tochor

  • Member of Parliament
  • Member of Parliament
  • Conservative
  • Saskatoon—University
  • Saskatchewan
  • Voting Attendance: 66%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $125,428.08

  • Government Page
Context: House Hansard - 161 - Feb/15/23
Mr. Corey Tochor (Saskatoon—University, CPC)
  • Feb/15/23 8:25:27 p.m.
  • Watch
  • Re: Bill C-39 
Madam Speaker, that was a powerful speech and it gives me great hope. We will probably come out of this on two different sides, in different parts of our lives, but I can tell that the member is a good dad and a good person. For the people watching at home or watching this clip on Facebook later on, even the intervention from my colleague from the NDP gives me great hope. This is not finished. This is not done. We have an opportunity here because there are good people in all parties. I think that this year, this opportunity, gives us, hopefully, some time to reflect on what is important and hear stories like the ones we just heard, that including mental diseases and conditions in MAID is wrong. It shall not be in our society that people seeking help for depression could possibly be turned to medically assisted suicide. I believe this is a blessing, that we have one year to hopefully convince enough of my colleagues, in all parties, that we need to not just pause this but scrap the idea that we could potentially solve one's mental health problems by providing suicide. We talk about why we are here and why we are having so much trouble with mental health. I think mental health and addictions, if we talk to different specialists, go hand in hand. I believe we are on a very dangerous course right now with the explosion of mental health issues and the acceptance of hard drugs in our country. We have an epidemic of overdoses happening right now. That is not medically assisted suicide. That is drugs-assisted suicide. This is not to say that there is an analogy to it, but it is wrong. We should not be allowing this in our society. We have to do more. We have to do more for mental health in Canada. This is a serious subject. I do not want to get partisan, but our health care system was garbage before the pandemic. It was underfunded and it was on life support before the pandemic. We went through the pandemic and we put our population through so many pressure points that no doubt we were going to have a spike in the abuse of drugs and mental health issues. The health care system, before the pandemic, was on life support. We kind of muddled our way through it, and here we are today. Other than the announcement a week ago, we have not had an increased health transfer to the provinces, which provide the health care these patients need. They need proper mental health supports, not the MAID 1-800 number. I am very frustrated with where we are as a society, that this is what the case is, that we cannot get help in this country. It is broken. We cannot find a doctor. We cannot get treatment. We cannot get addiction beds: “Come back in 18 months and we might have a spot for you.” How is that treatment? I have heard people say that the health care professionals will have check boxes and forms and it has to go through a secondary step and it is going to get signed off on by another professional. Who has time for that? We cannot even find family doctors to see patients for common colds, but we are going to have all these health care professionals who are going to go through all these applications and somehow weed out the ones that should not be there. It is just not going to happen. It is frustrating that we are here tonight debating this. There is no court in Canada that said that we need to expand MAID for people suffering from mental health issues. Not a single court ruling said to blow this wide open and offer it to anyone who is having issues. We need to spend this year to think about the ramifications of this. We heard the member talk about his 40-year-old son. This is the part that gets me. I am a relatively new dad. My two boys are not 40, but nine and seven, and they are going to have challenges as teenagers. We all had challenges as teenagers. We all know teenagers who had challenges, and hopefully not too many of us know teenagers who took their lives. Life is hard sometimes. Teenagers have pressure where it seems like the whole world is on them, and they make that choice. We cannot stop what young adults do. I worry about my two kids, who are going to go through the same things that everyone in this chamber has gone through: the pressures of being an adolescent, or as was said in here, a mature minor. They are not mature minors; they are teenagers who are going to have tough days. I had tough days. I do not want my two boys to think that just because they are depressed and having a tough go of it, or maybe having more serious mental health concerns, they can just access MAID and be done. That is the wrong approach for Canada. I will do whatever I can in the next 12 months to convince enough members of this chamber that this bill needs to be—
891 words
  • Hear!
  • Rabble!
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