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Garnett Genuis

Conservative on Medical Assistance in Dying Safeguards Act

Replying to Luc Thériault (Bloc Québécois)
“Mr. Speaker, if I understand correctly, the Conservatives’ position on advance requests is that people who become incapacitated and will suffer due to cognitive decline should die after suffering to the very end. That is the Conservatives’ solution. I would invite my colleague to meet with Sandra from Montigny and tell her that. They care about suicide prevention. The Supreme Court said that this infringes on the right to life because people will be forced to shorten their lives. What people do is set a threshold for what they consider tolerable. They want to live for as long as possible, but when they reach that threshold, they are asking us to compassionately prevent them from continuing to suffer through their decline. The Conservatives’ solution is to tell them to keep suffering until the very end. I do not know if my colleague has ever seen someone dying of Alzheimer’s disease suffer to the very end. If he wants to see that, I can invite him over.”

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Mr. Speaker, respectfully, what would be set up in this legislation is ridiculous and unreal. It says, on the one hand, that we must allow a person to live as long as they want, up to the point of intolerable suffering. At the same time, it is saying that somebody else, external to them, would decide, based on an advance directive written years before the suffering has even been experienced, comparing that document to what they perceive the person’s experiences are. The idea that somebody else is going to decide what is intolerable suffering for a person who does not have capacity to consent, and is not even being asked to consent, is ludicrous. It is nonsensical. The only basis on which the framework could plausibly work is with contemporaneous consent, where the person attests to their own suffering. How can a third party attest to the level of suffering a person is experiencing? Again, it is dangerous and nonsensical to have somebody else make decisions for them.