Ziad Aboultaif

“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-41, the medical assistance in dying safeguards act, undoubtedly a matter of profound moral weight and a subject that touches on the core of our humanity, our duty of care and our responsibilities as legislators. Few issues before this House demand as much solemn reflection, unyielding principle and careful constitutional stewardship as medical assistance in dying. Our core priority as Conservatives has been clear from day one and will continue to be about protecting vulnerable Canadians and ensuring that robust, clear and uncompromised safeguards are in place surrounding consent and patient safety. Canadians must be able to trust that any decision regarding MAID is strictly voluntary, fully informed and completely free of pressure, subtle coercion or undue influence from any outside source. However, as we examine the current trajectory of MAID expansion and the legislative proposals before us surrounding advance requests, serious legal, ethical and practical questions arise. These are questions that we, as elected representatives of the people, cannot afford to sweep aside or ignore for the sake of political convenience. Allowing individual provinces and territories to decide independently on whether to permit advance requests risks creating a deeply confusing, fractured patchwork of systems across Canada. I do not want to digress, but we can point to many examples that speak to exactly that, where we have mayhem when too many people and too many jurisdictions have control over similar things. Quite often, it is not in the national interest and not in the interest of Canadians. Back to this legislation, such fragmentation would only serve to increase inequity in MAID access, while simultaneously weakening standardized oversight. Canadians deserve the same baseline protections and safety guarantees, regardless of the province or territory in which they reside. Leaving essential aspects of advance requests to a mosaic of provincial legislation raises deeply concerning prospects of inconsistent safeguards across our country. Furthermore, the proposed decriminalization of advance requests introduces deeply contested legal and ethical considerations that our legal framework is ill prepared to manage. Advance euthanasia requests would introduce heightened and unprecedented risks for both patients and health care providers, including the irreversible and devastating risk of wrongful death. Consider the fundamental, irreconcilable challenge of consent. How can consent be truly protected when a person can no longer communicate their current living wishes? A decision taken and recorded years or even decades earlier in a legal document may not reflect how that same individual feels today. Human circumstances change, perspectives shift, and human resilience in the face of hardship often surprises us. Advance MAID requests must not be allowed to remain valid indefinitely without mandatory regular review, renewal and re-evaluation. Equally dangerous is the reality that under this proposed advance request model, health care practitioners would effectively be forced to substitute their own subjective judgment to determine whether a patient’s suffering has become intolerable at a time when the patient can no longer express how they actually feel. No Canadian should ever receive MAID because someone else, whether a doctor, a family member, a bureaucrat, a politician or anyone else, believes their suffering has become unbearable. Disability, dependence or declining health should never be treated as proof or justification that a person’s life is no longer worth living. Our legal safeguards must explicitly protect vulnerable Canadians from ageist or discriminatory assumptions about their quality of life. If there is ever any doubt about whether someone is actively refusing MAID, their life must come first if they express reluctance in any way. A simple 30-day waiting period is no substitute for a thorough independent assessment when genuine uncertainty exists. Parliament must be fully satisfied that safeguards can reliably protect people who are no longer able to speak up or advocate for themselves. We must also directly confront the broader scope of MAID’s expansion into health care domains where safety cannot be guaranteed. Canadian legal and health care systems are simply not equipped to respond safely to the expansion of MAID where mental illness is the sole underlying medical condition. For years, Conservatives have stood firm on this critical point, advocating for caution and medical responsibility. I am pleased that the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying finally aligned itself with Conservative leadership in recognizing that mental illness as the sole underlying condition should be indefinitely paused. Maintaining that exclusion explicitly recognizes the significant unresolved safety concerns surrounding these complex clinical cases. My colleague the Conservative member of Parliament for Cloverdale—Langley City took concrete legislative action on this issue by introducing a private member’s bill, Bill C-218. Her bill would have amended the Criminal Code to permanently repeal the scheduled expansion of the MAID program for mental illness as the sole underlying condition. Unfortunately, and for reasons very difficult to defend, the Liberals voted against it. We must ensure that our national laws offer treatment, comprehensive psychiatric support, compassion and hope to those facing severe mental health struggles instead of an administrative avenue to simply end their lives. To restore trust and ensure strict accountability across the entire medical system, Conservatives have consistently advocated for stronger federal monitoring and comprehensive public reporting. We need minimum national standards for MAID oversight, updated clinical guidance, training for practitioners and an urgent, thorough review of the effectiveness and real-world enforceability of current safeguards. To that end, Canada should establish an independent national MAID oversight commission modelled after Quebec’s framework to review individual cases, monitor strict compliance with legal standards and publish detailed annual reports for the Canadian public. At the absolute heart of the debate is a basic moral promise that no Canadian should ever feel that MAID is their only available option because they cannot access proper medical care, affordable housing or adequate social support. Vulnerable Canadians deserve real care, robust protection and genuine hope. They should never be offered MAID as a tragic substitute for basic social and medical support that their governments have failed to provide. Governments must prioritize and ensure meaningful, universal access to high-quality palliative care, disability supports, specialized housing and mental health services in every community across this country. Our laws reflect our core social values. When citizens are at their most vulnerable, such as when they are sick, aging, living with disabilities or facing severe personal hardship, they need to know that their country values their existence and that we stand by them. Let us ensure that our national legislation upholds human dignity, strengthens national safeguards and unequivocally puts the protection of human life first.”