Andrew Lawton

“Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend and colleague for his excellent work on this important issue. He has spoken a lot in the context of this issue about hope, about people finding hope, about people recovering and about people being able to continue their lives under new circumstances. I think that relates to the point about advance requests. In the last report on MAID in Canada, 692 people made a request for MAID and then changed their mind. That can happen in the absence of advance directives, but under an advance directives framework, if someone signs an advance directive and then loses capacity or is simply not told before a health care practitioner takes their life, then there is no opportunity for them to change their mind. It is clear in the legislation that if a person actively resists, the process is supposed to stop, but a health care practitioner is not required to inform them of what they are about to do. There is no such requirement. How does that take into consideration the almost 700 people who changed their mind?”