44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 15, 2023 02:00PM
Madam Speaker, I invite my colleague to read the expert report, which clearly states that, when treatment exists, people are not automatically eligible for medical assistance in dying just because the treatment is hard to get.
That is the shortcut the Conservatives have been taking since the start of this debate. Just because a person with depression asks for MAID does not necessarily mean they will get it. Just because someone somewhere is considering MAID because they are depressed does not mean they will have access to it. That is what they do not understand. There are assessors, providers, professionals whose job is to provide care for people whose condition is reversible. Is anyone here going to suggest that depression is irreversible?
Our colleagues talked about the experiences of people who attempted suicide. In every case, the condition was reversible. In fact, some Conservative members even talked about their own experience. They are here to tell the tale. We have to see things clearly. There are 16 key recommendations that are worth reading. I invite them to read the report.
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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—
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Madam Speaker, we are talking about mental illness, mental distress and depression as being reasons why it may be permissible to ask for assistance in dying. I look at this and say that we have come a long way. Our laws were based on some court rulings surrounding people who wanted to die because they had lost their ability to control their bodies. They had ALS; they had no control over their bodies at all. They could not actually go through the act of committing suicide, but they maintained razor-sharp consciousness and a strong will. Sue Rodriguez is one example.
We should not go from that to somebody who is essentially having a failure of will. That is what depression is, being unable to formulate plans to carry on and instead saying there is an easy way out. This seems to me to be fundamentally dangerous, to be almost leading people on. It seems to me this is an obvious underlying problem.
I am glad to have a year to slow down this progress in the wrong direction. Quite frankly, I think we should be very much looking at some entirely different direction. The idea that the courts are somehow going to impose on Canada in the situation of depressed people, people who are struggling because of circumstances that are hard in their lives, is that “life is hard; death is easy”. It is absolutely outrageous to say, “This is it. The kingdom of death is upon us; that is just dandy".
I guess I am asking my colleague to offer some commentary on this national abdication of will that seems to be, at best, coming a year from the present.
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Madam Speaker, the member's question will give me an opportunity to once again underline what the member is trying to get at, which is that this is wrong. Leadership is not just putting something to the courts and following a ruling. On this one, the courts were not even asking for mental health to be a factor in MAID.
Maybe this is the point where backbenchers and other parties, cabinet ministers or MPs can take these 12 months to consider all the arguments, for and against. I have a very tough time with including mental health. I do not think there is a single honest, good reason why someone should access MAID because of depression or other serious mental health issues.
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