Costas Menegakis

In response to a question from Kevin Lamoureux

“We need to study this assisted dying bill very carefully. We must listen to doctors, lawyers, families, veterans, and people with disabilities. We should send the bill to committee and propose changes to improve it. The government needs to listen to other parties and the public, because this bill is about human life.”

“Mr. Speaker, Bill C-41 is before us. I think it is incumbent upon us to discuss it in full detail in the context of what it means for people who are at the end of their life or who are very close to people who are at the end of their lives. I think we need to carefully examine this piece of legislation. We need to consult medical professionals, legal experts, families, veterans and people living with disabilities and listen to them. We need to bring it to committee, discuss it, discuss it here in the House and propose amendments. The government has not been forthcoming in welcoming amendments from other parties in the House. With legislation like this, I think it is important that the government listens to not only what its members think, but also what other people think as well. We are the voice of the people in the House. We should listen to the experts who give us advice and make this legislation as strong and as foolproof as possible, because we are talking about the most important thing for all of us, which is life.”

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In response to a question from Ziad Aboultaif

“We should not allow assisted dying for people with mental illness. Offering it to people at their lowest point makes no sense. We needed my colleague's bill to stop this, but the government voted against it.”

“Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for sharing a very personal and passionate story about his personal experience with a close friend of his who he had to unfortunately say goodbye to. It is something that touched him profoundly and he shared it with us here in the House. Mental illness is a big subject. It encompasses a whole bunch of different people who have mental illness for a whole variety of reasons, and there is a process to get through that. To give them the option of MAID at a time when they are at the lowest in their lives, when they feel there is no future for them, whether it is health-related or otherwise, makes absolutely no sense. Excluding it from the legislation through the legislation my colleague put forward in the House was mandatory and needed. Unfortunately, the government voted against it.”

In response to a question from Yves Perron

“The federal government should keep control over assisted dying rules. Giving this power to the provinces has not worked well in the past. This issue is too important to all Canadians to leave to the provinces without strong federal oversight.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is a slippery slope when we start passing on our responsibility as federal legislators and including more and more legislative bodies across the country to have the provinces to weigh in and have jurisdiction over something as important as this, especially the specific details of this particular legislation. We have seen other matters of jurisdiction across the country that have been disseminated down to the provinces, and we have seen how that has not worked effectively. This is something of profound moral interest to all Canadians, and I do not believe in including provinces, giving them additional responsibilities and having them weigh in on this without clear federal oversight. The things that need to be addressed in this particular legislation should be passed on to the provinces.”

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In response to a question from Judy A. Sgro

“I support keeping mental illness out of medical assistance in dying, but I still have serious concerns. The government should focus on providing proper healthcare, housing, and social services instead of offering medically assisted dying as an easy way out.”

“Mr. Speaker, the hon. member’s question was very thoughtful. We welcome the exclusion of mental illness as the sole underlying condition, but serious questions still remain. That addresses the first part of the member’s question. On the second part, I think it is incumbent upon the government, and upon all of us as legislators, to ensure the proper health professionals, social services and housing, all of the issues that are important to fundamental dignity and life for all Canadians, are available to them. We need to focus on improving those services rather than having an easy out where someone can opt for MAID. We are playing with a very deep moral, ethical and, in some cases, religious issue here. It is much more important that we focus on providing adequate services to people rather than legislation such as this.”

“I do not want this bill to pass without much stronger rules. Letting people ask for medically assisted dying years in advance is dangerous because feelings change and people who cannot speak for themselves cannot give consent. It risks wrongful death. We need stronger national rules, independent oversight, and better care and housing so people do not choose death just because they lack support.”

“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.”

“There are not enough homes for everyone who needs one. This makes rent go up, keeps young couples from buying a home, and forces newcomers into crowded basements or shelters. The government does not understand this basic problem.”

“Mr. Speaker, here is the reality. When housing supply cannot keep pace with demand, the result is higher rents, higher wait lists and young people giving up on their dream of ever owning a home. That is not fair to young Canadian couples who cannot afford a home to start a family, and it is not fair to the newcomer who was promised an opportunity and ended up in an overcrowded basement suite or a shelter. This is something the government does not get. Why does the government not understand this basic principle?”

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In response to a question from Cheryl Gallant

“The previous Conservative government used a one-page form to approve and build 23,500 projects quickly. This government has only created 14 new offices to make decisions, and it has built nothing.”

“Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the colleague for recalling a time when the government actually took these projects seriously and when a minister took action. Minister Baird, at the time in charge of infrastructure, sat down with his colleagues in the ministry. He gave them a directive to fast-track the approval process down to a one-page application and that resulted in 23,500 projects being built. The current government and this Prime Minister have built 14 new offices. Can members believe it? They built 14 new centres for people to make decisions, just bloating and bloating the democracy with zero results for Canadians and not a single shovel in the ground.”

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In response to a question from Steeve Lavoie

“This bill is just an old bill brought back again. The government makes deals abroad instead of debating them here, and it has not actually built any of these major projects.”

“Mr. Speaker, the hon. member should be reminded that we are talking about Bill C-39, the build Canada act for major projects across the country of major significance. The current government has done none of that. It has not put a shovel in the ground. It is all talk and no action. The Prime Minister is flying all over the world, making agreements and signing things. He brings nothing into the House to be discussed and there is no debate whatsoever in committee, yet, here we are now talking about Bill C-39, a rehash of Bill C-5 of 18 months ago. I commend the member for his question and I hope that he actually does see some action in his riding.”

“I do not want this bill to pass. The government promises fast project approvals, but this bill does not fix the real delays. Its one-year deadline is fake because ministers can pause and extend the clock indefinitely. Instead, we should repeal the laws blocking energy projects, end the industrial carbon tax, and create a real, binding one-year limit to approve projects.”

“Mr. Speaker, I spent many years in the private sector running my own business. I can tell members that being out there in the real economy, meeting payroll, selling and delivering goods and services, one learns a very fundamental and simple lesson very quickly: Absolutely nobody pays people for announcements, nobody writes them a cheque for a press release, and customers certainly do not reward them for empty photo ops. They are judged strictly, fairly and ruthlessly by what they deliver. The Prime Minister came into office making grand promises. He promised Canadians that he would build at speeds not seen in years, if not generations, yet here we are 18 months later, and still not one single shovel is in the ground. I will take some time today to look deeper into why this paralysis persists and why more broken legislation from a worn-out government will never fix legislation that it broke in the first place. Just a year and a half ago, the Prime Minister marched into the chamber championing Bill C-5. He told Canadians that he would finally unleash construction speeds not seen in generations. The headlines were glowing, the announcement ceremonies were lavish and grand, and the promises were astronomical, but as Canadians have come to learn all too well, they were just empty words. After all the endless talk, all the international summits, the luxury travel abroad, the expensive catering and the state photo ops, how many actual projects has this new government office built? Zero. How many permits has it successfully issued? Zero. How many hard-working Canadians are on a job site earning a living because of it? There are zero, zip, nada, rien, tipota. What the government managed to build is an even more bloated bureaucracy and an unprecedented centralization of power in the minister’s and Prime Minister’s offices. In the last 18 months, the Prime Minister has somehow managed to create 14 brand new government agencies, which brings us squarely to where we find ourselves today: endless manufacturing urgency yet absolutely nothing accomplished. People are judged by what they deliver. Look at the Pacific link pipeline. The Prime Minister grandly designated it a project of national interest. Let me share a news flash with my Liberal friends across the aisle: Another vital pipeline heading to our Pacific coast has always been a matter of critical national interest, and construction should have broken many years ago. Due to layer upon layer of punishing Liberal regulations, red tape and suffocating bureaucracy, no private proponent would step forward. No pipeline was ever built. Fast-forward to today, and the private sector still has zero confidence in the government’s ability to provide regulatory certainty. That leaves taxpayers on the hook to own and build their own pipeline. How does the Prime Minister propose to provide such much-needed certainty to private investors now? It is by proposing another bill, a legislative text that is supposed to fix what the last bill, passed 18 months ago, was supposed to fix. This new piece of legislation clocks in at a staggering 250 pages, and we are expected to believe that it would magically cure all the systematic problems the Liberals themselves engineered over the last 11 years. Let us be clear about what is missing from the bill. It would not repeal Bill C-69, Justin Trudeau’s notorious antidevelopment law. It would not repeal Bill C-48, the Liberal job-killing ban on shipping oil off our west coast. It would not eliminate the punishing industrial carbon tax. All the structural obstacles that have systematically chased investment capital and talent out of this country for a decade would remain entirely untouched. The bill would still force project proponents to address “any other matter relevant to the impact assessment that the [agency] requires to be taken into account.” How can the Liberals stand up and lecture us about regulatory certainty, when their checklist of arbitrary demands has no end? Is it just the Prime Minister who gets to decide who wins and who loses? The government’s big selling point for this legislation is the magical one-year timeline: one project, one decision and one year. It sounds wonderful in a sound bite, but let us look closely at the fine print. I cannot tell the Speaker to pause the clock on my speaking time and allow me to speak for 20 minutes today. Under this new bill, the government would be able to do precisely that. The official clock could be stopped. The bureaucracy could hit the pause button for a multitude of reasons, and the suspended time would simply vanish from the calculation. A company could spend years wrapped up in red tape and the Liberals would still claim that it all happened within one year. If that loophole is not wide enough, the minister could unilaterally tack on 90-day extensions. If that is not enough, the government could run behind closed doors to cabinet and extend the timeline yet again, with absolutely no hard limit whatsoever. Let us put ourselves in the shoes of a serious investor for a moment. Would we allocate billions of dollars of capital knowing full well that a Liberal cabinet that has spent the last 10 years actively blocking major projects retains the absolute legal power to delay our money and our project’s decision indefinitely? Here is the critical part the Liberals deliberately avoid talking about. The famous one-year clock would not even start ticking until the proponent has completed all preplanning, finished every single consultation and submitted exhaustive engineering and scientific data for a full assessment on every secondary permit along the way. Let us be completely honest with Canadians about what this legislation actually is. There is no real enforceable one-year timeline in the bill. It is pure smoke and mirrors. There are shiny headlines without deadlines. There are devastating real-world consequences when the government chooses endless talk over actual building. The Prime Minister grandly promised Canadians the fastest-growing economy in the G7. Instead, the OECD places Canada well deep in the pack, with our economic growth forecast slashed all the way down to a miserable 0.9 per cent. Canadian households are now among the most heavily indebted in the entire industrialized world. Let us think of that for a moment. Families across our country watch their mortgage renewal approach with sheer dread and look at their grocery bill with absolute disbelief from week to week. International investors are noticing this dysfunction. Representatives from the U.A.E. came to this country looking to invest a staggering $90 billion. Just six months later, they returned and stated publicly that they could not find a single approved shovel-ready project to put that capital into. What is the alternative? We as Conservatives have a clear, pragmatic plan that is beautifully simple: one project, one review and one approval within one year. We know it can be done, because it has been done. During the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, our minister John Baird told his department officials that he wanted the application form for infrastructure projects brought down to a single page. After significant back and forth, they delivered a clean, functional, one-page application form. What was the remarkable result? Roughly 23,500 projects went swiftly from concept to completion in under two years. Other people warned at the time that it would be an unmitigated disaster for safety and environmental standards. However, when the environmental commissioners subsequently audited those exact projects, what did they find? Not a single one came back with a safety and environmental problem. That tells us something critically important: All the mountains of paperwork, all the endless procedural hoops and all the deliberate delays have everything to do with feeding a bloated, self-serving bureaucracy that thrives entirely by getting in the way of progress. Here is what Conservatives will do: repeal Bill C-69, repeal Bill C-48, scrap the punishing industrial carbon tax once and for all, approve hundreds of projects currently languishing and put a real, hard, binding cap on approval times, not a fake timeline that can be paused, extended and stretched into infinity. Canada should be the fastest place to secure a building permit, but we will certainly not take the government’s word for anything it is saying, because Canadians have heard these exact hollow promises far too many times before. The blunt truth is that the Prime Minister does not need to do more announcements. He needs to stop blocking, stop taxing, stop obstructing, and stop signing meaningless memoranda of understanding that yield zero results. He needs to get out of the way and let our builders build, let our workers work, let our investors invest, and get projects built for the prosperity of all Canadians.”

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“The government's previous bill only created more government offices. This new bill promises more of the same. I want the member to name just one project that has actually started construction in the last 18 months.”

“Mr. Speaker, about 18 months ago, the government introduced the One Canadian Economy Act, Bill C-5. Since then, a whole slew of bureaucratic offices and agencies have been opened up by the government. Today we are debating Bill C-39, promising more and more of the same. I wonder if the member opposite can point to where the shovel has hit the ground for just one project in Canada since the government took over 18 months ago.”

“This bill could make it a crime for people to read out loud from their holy books. Why did the government not talk to religious groups before trying to remove these protections for free speech and religion?”

“Madam Speaker, the bill would basically strip away the right of a person to quote from their holy text. It would open the door to criminalizing people for uttering words that they are reading from their holy text. I wonder if the member can share with us why the Liberal government did not consult with faith communities across the country to see what the impact would be of taking away these statutory rules that have been in place for so long now, that protect people and allow people to have freedom of speech and freedom of faith. There is a difference between state and faith. I wonder if the member could comment on that.”