Senator Wallin: This is a concept that already exists in other parts of law, but “independent witnesses” would be best characterized as those that the client, the patient and the person who is requesting MAID, in consultation with medical professionals over time, has suggested would be independent and would not have a vested interest in the outcome or the decision of the patient.

Senator Wallin: I have discussed this whole issue at length with the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers. These are doctors. They are often family doctors. So these are people who have known the patient over years and over time.

I just had this discussion with someone last week. The importance of us all filling out these forms and making wishes clear over time and with a variety of people helps ensure that kind of independence. It may be that you have some of your family members involved. You may have friends or outsiders. You might go to a lawyer. You might go to a separate doctor from your own family doctor. There are many options.

If you make those comments, thoughts and beliefs known to your friends, family and, more importantly, written down, then you have that guarantee or backup. The medical professionals who are engaged in the medical assistance in dying, or MAID, area very much want this to happen. They are seeking provincial rules — that’s part of what they negotiate and deal with — to clarify this.

You will find in any of the forms that you are asked to fill out — of course, you can have variations on that, if there’s something that gives you, specifically, more comfort — that there are lots of ways to make this clear.

I’m a woman who doesn’t have children or a husband, so I would obviously have to go beyond the parameters of immediate family — perhaps a more distant relative, a niece or nephew. But I would have made this action very clear early in the process. That is why I keep suggesting and almost begging that I wish we would do this not only for ourselves to ensure that our own requests and wishes are respected, but that we do this for the sake of those who love us and want to make sure that these really are our wishes and that it’s carried out.

It does mean responsibility for us earlier in life. I know when you’re 29, nobody thinks about this. But for most of us in here, it’s well-timed for us to be thinking about these issues. It’s clarity for yourself as well. If you go through this process of filling out these forms and going through the exercises that are required, it really makes you examine your own feelings. It makes sure that there is a definition there. There’s a certainty there. There’s a commitment there.

If you ask others to participate in that process with you, be they a lawyer, family or friends, then you actually are getting that sense of security from them and for them that they are willing to bear witness to this.

It’s an obligation. It’s a heavy obligation. We have to take it most seriously. The sooner we start that process, the better. That’s where we would get to those definitions because it would be a group of people who would be engaged in this process over time.

[Translation]

Hon. Pamela Wallin: Senator Gold, yesterday an all-party committee of the National Assembly of Quebec called on the province to allow advance requests for medical assistance in dying following the diagnosis of an incurable or incapacitating disease. Canadian law currently excludes people with degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s. The committee stated that capable people who will ultimately be incapacitated should be able to formulate an advance request for MAID as a result of the diagnosis. They added that the recommendations reflect an evolution in thinking and attitudes. To ensure the patient is acting in a free and informed manner, the committee recommends an advance request for MAID be completed and signed in front of a doctor, as well as countersigned by two witnesses or be made in a notarized form.

This is essentially what the Senate of Canada approved at the beginning of the year, but it was rejected by the government. Will the government please now reconsider?