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House Hansard - 159

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 13, 2023 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 159 - Feb/13/23
Hon. Michelle Rempel Garner (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC)
  • Feb/13/23 9:54:29 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-39 
Madam Speaker, we are here tonight, at nearly 10 o'clock in Ottawa, discussing a difficult topic, but one that every Canadian should be concerned about. I would like to outline what we are talking about tonight so I can give my argument in that context. In 2020, a bill was tabled to discuss and put forward proposals to expand medically assisted dying, and then in the other place, the Senate, there was an amendment made after committee study, and after due diligence, which the government rammed through. Without scrutiny, the government rammed through an amendment that was put forward by an unelected and unaccountable body to expand medically assisted dying to persons with mental health issues. That bill ended up passing, and now we are here today debating an initiative that the government now wants to undertake to extend the date that service would become available to Canadians from this year and month, to a year from now. I want to be very clear. I am going to vote in favour of extending this timeline, but under no circumstances in this country right now should medically assisted dying be extended to persons with mental health issues. For colleagues who are in the Liberal caucus who have the ability to speak to their leaders behind closed doors, our country is suffering. There are so many people who are hurting who may have had some mental health issues before the pandemic due to job loss, lack of access to services, issues that happened in relationships or so many things. We are a country that is in the middle of a mental health crisis, yet today the most amount of time we have spent debating how we, as Parliament, and the government are going to support Canadians with mental health issues is to offer medically assisted dying. I just find it reprehensible and an abdication of responsibility of every person in here of every political stripe to allow medically assisted dying to be extended to Canadians, given the abject and miserable state of mental health supports for Canadians across this country. Nobody can access mental health services in this country. Even privileged people have difficult times accessing mental health supports. Everybody in this country will need somebody to talk to or will go through crises, and every once in a while we get something from a corporation, such as Bell Let's Talk day, but when the rubber hits the road and somebody needs someone to talk to, those services are not adequately there, or they are too expensive. For the government to even contemplate allowing this for such people, where one of the symptoms of mental health issues is to express, in certain circumstances, wishes to die, is so irresponsible. My opinion is that we should not only delay this from coming into force for a year, but also not do it at all. The government promised $4.5 billion for mental health services, and that is nowhere to be found. The NDP is in a supply coalition with the government. This should be number one on its list of demands. There should be no support of medically assisted dying without some sort of plan to address the lack of staff in mental health support services, the burnout in mental health services and the lack of funding. In my province of Alberta, the amount of funding the government just offered the Province of Alberta, $500 million, in this last round of talks was about the same it spent on airport COVID testing after it had lifted restrictions for airport COVID tests. The government has its priorities all wrong. This is not just about spending or waste. This is people's lives. It is suggesting that we should be extending medically assisted dying at a time when we have not even begun talking about destigmatizing mental health issues. There are a lot of people who would never talk about it. They feel like it is a shame to struggle. They do not have someone to talk to or have a support network. As parliamentarians, we are contemplating normalizing offering medically assisted dying. How did we get to this point? How did the government even think this was appropriate? It even snuck it in on a Senate amendment. No. We should be pushing this deadline off. My colleague from British Columbia tabled a bill to remove this provision and I support his legislation 100%. It is smart, it is compassionate and it should receive cross-party support. There is nobody in here who can argue, with a straight face, that the mental health support services for Canadians are anywhere close to adequate at all. It is our duty, as parliamentarians, to give people hope to live. That is our first goal. That is what we should be doing, not sitting in some academic chamber listening to people argue legal technicalities around maybe something means medically assisted dying. We have to have a moral compass sometimes in this place. There is no way this should proceed in Canada. Even my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands talked about the explosive use of MAID and the slippery slope that actually happened. It was not a logical fallacy in debate. We have evidence of it. There are no safeguards and there are no supports to help Canadians make the choice to live. I am begging everybody in this place, first and foremost, help Canadians live. We need to help Canadians live by pushing this off and by supporting my colleague from B.C.'s bill. We should not even need this private member's bill. We should not be wasting time in the House of Commons pushing this decision off for a year. We should not even be talking about it at all. We should be debating late in the night about how we give Canadians the support they need. In a CBC article from February 2, the justice minister was quoted talking about why he wanted to extend it for a year. It was not for any of the reasons that I gave or colleagues of other political stripes have talked about. He said, “We want, in particular, those health practitioners, those faculties of medicine, colleges who had some concerns to have the time to internalize what is happening.” His concern and motive for delaying this was not to protect Canadians. It was to foist this ideology upon our top medical practitioners at a time when they are burnt out, suffering and underfunded after two years of a pandemic and a woefully broken health care system. There is no way we should be extending medically assisted dying to mental health in Canada given how broken our health care system is and the lack of hope Canadians have right now. It is our job to be offering them hope and to be doing everything possible for Canadians who have mental health issues to have that hope. For anybody who is listening to this tonight, there are so many lines out there. If someone is struggling with mental health issues, they can reach out and know that there are people in this place who understand that everyone has a right to live. They have a right to live with dignity, with hope and with compassion, and that is what we are fighting for. That is why there are people of differing ideologies in this place who will fight tooth and nail to get the government to focus on what is good, just and beautiful.
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