Honourable senators, I will be making an amendment with this particular speech.

Assisted suicide is final. There is absolutely no room for error or innocent lives will be lost. That is why any consideration of expanding the regime to those for whom death is not reasonably foreseeable must be subject to the most stringent safeguards. The courts have also said this. And yet in Bill C-7, the federal government has started to roll back even the safeguards that were put into the legislation less than five years ago.

Bill C-7 would eliminate the 10-day waiting period between a request for and the delivery of assisted dying where death is reasonably foreseeable. It allows for the waiver of final consent, opening the door to advanced directives, and it removes the requirement that a request for assisted death must be signed before two independent witnesses. Now only one will do.

We are treading on dangerous and shifting ground here, and it is moving too fast. It was only five years ago, during our pre-study on the issue of assisted dying, that our Legal Committee voted unanimously to ensure at least 15 clear days between signing a request for MAID and providing the death. We sent that recommendation back to the Trudeau government but they refused to accept it, instead opting for 10 days. Even at that, it could be shortened if necessary in order to preserve consent. Now, here we are and they’re removing it altogether.

Even the creator of the original assisted-dying legislation, former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, has expressed concern about the removal of safeguards in Bill C-7. Last fall in Question Period she asked the current Minister of Justice David Lametti why this new legislation abandoned safeguards from Bill C-14, especially when neither the lower Quebec court’s Truchon decision nor the Supreme Court’s Carter decision required it. The minister’s response was to refer to his so-called intensive consultations the government supposedly conducted on this bill.

Perhaps those are the same intensive consultations one Indigenous witness at committee called “inadequate” and of which another said: “I don’t believe there has been any engagement in a proper way.” Or perhaps it was what disability rights group Inclusion Canada has called the hasty and completely inadequate process for round-table discussions with persons with disabilities; or maybe Minister Lametti was referring to the government’s online consultation, which I can assure you was minimal because I filled it out myself. The questions were written in a prescribed way, with only limited answers to steer responses in one direction, and the only way to provide additional information was in long form comments that are more difficult to quantify.

Media reported that some people had taken the online questionnaire multiple times, some even dozens of times. It’s ridiculous. Canadians didn’t get adequate consultations. We didn’t have a parliamentary review. All this Trudeau government has given us on this is SurveyMonkey. That’s not consultation, honourable senators, and it is not a sufficient basis for rolling back protections that are meant to safeguard people’s lives. There is no return policy with assisted suicide.

Dr. Harvey Schipper warned the Legal Committee about the need to retain safeguards in Bill C-7 because of the lack of any evidence to the contrary. He said:

. . . I don’t think we have the evidence to remove any safeguards. In fairness, I don’t think we have the evidence to add new ones. We just don’t know. You have got trivial data from 13,000 cases.

Dr. Schipper was referring to cases in which MAID was administered in Canada.

Certainly taking out the waiting period is really, really foolish. It’s un-biological.

The courts have understood the necessity for strong safeguards in the establishment of any assisted dying regime. In its Carter decision, the Supreme Court of Canada agreed with the trial judge that the risks associated with physician-assisted death can be limited through a carefully designed and monitored system of safeguards. The lower Quebec court decision in Truchon stated:

The Court instead accepts that the other eligibility criteria and safeguards already in place in the legislation are sufficient to ensure that the system can provide medical assistance in dying to individuals who are entitled to it.

Neither court ruling called for the revocation of existing safeguards.

The Trudeau government asserts that removing the 10-day waiting period between the day the request for MAID is signed and the day it occurs causes increased suffering. Of course, this does not take into account the risk of shortening a life prematurely in the event that a patient might change his or her mind. Law professor Trudo Lemmens spoke to this balance at our Legal Committee.

The argument for removal —

— of the reflection period —

— is that it cruelly imposes suffering on people who made up their mind already, but that ignores that it protects people who may have weeks, months or even years of further meaningful life. There is, to my knowledge, no legal, ethical or medical expertise that permits us to confidently conclude that the suffering of some associated with the delay outweighs the risk that others are prematurely deprived of their life. . . . nothing can undo a person’s death. It seems perfectly reasonable in public policy to err on the side of prudence.

Proponents of assisted suicide maintain that people who wish to access assisted dying have already made up their minds by the time they are within 10 days of completing MAID. We heard significant testimony at our Legal Committee pre-study that suicidality can fluctuate greatly. Dr. Harvey Chochinov testified:

Our research group reported that will to live can fluctuate highly over intervals as short as 12 to 24 hours. In fact, 40% of patients who were prescribed lethal drugs in Oregon decided not to take a lethal overdose, preferring to let their underlying disease take its natural course.

Dr. Leonie Herx, from the Canadian Society of Palliative Care Physicians, expressed her concern about the removal of the 10‑day waiting period, saying:

If you remove the 10-day waiting period, we will be in a situation in Canada where people can request MAID and get it on the same day, when we’ve just heard that up to 40% of people have not even had palliative care involvement prior to requesting MAID. And now, with this legislation, we’re possibly going to be ending someone’s life on the same day when they’ve not had proper information or proper experience of how their suffering could be addressed in other ways.

Clearly, a decision of this magnitude requires additional reflection.

Honourable senators, this period of reflection is only 10 days. That’s shorter than a long-range weather forecast or a COVID self-quarantine period. You get more time than that to return a small purchase from most stores. Senators, we in the Senate of Canada are a body of sober second thought. Shouldn’t Canadians have the ability for sober second thought about ending their own lives?

The government seems to be throwing out safeguards without even understanding what it is they’re doing. Take, for example, the provision in Bill C-7 which will reduce the required number of independent witnesses for a request for MAID from two down to one. When Minister Patty Hajdu appeared before our Legal Committee she told us:

The only role of a witness is to confirm the identity of the person signing and dating their requests. Witnesses play no role in determining whether someone is eligible for MAID or whether their decision is voluntary and informed. . . .

The minister said this during here pre-planned and prepared opening remarks, so this comment obviously was not off the cuff. Yet when I asked Department of Justice officials to verify that last week, they told me:

Our view would be that the role of the witness to the written request is both to confirm that the person signing the request is the person the request is about, and to confirm that that person understands what it is they are signing and is signing it voluntarily.

It seems that the Trudeau government is in such a rush to push this legislation through that their ministers are failing to read the fine print. Does Minister Hajdu even know what’s going on? We know she doesn’t know what’s going on with vaccine contracts, but she doesn’t even know the process for people to die — the process she is helping to expand. There is no excuse for that kind of negligence by a minister in life-or-death matters as important as these.

It is this Trudeau government’s haste to make these changes so quickly — too quickly — that concerns me the most. During a pandemic, where people are suffering and everything else seems to be delayed or moving slowly, this government can’t seem to get this assisted-suicide legislation passed fast enough. It is ready to abandon whatever safeguards it can, like a boat taking on water. Why this bill? Why now? We haven’t even had a parliamentary review. We don’t even know yet what we don’t know. And the courts haven’t asked the government to roll back significant safeguards. That is why I am proposing an amendment today that will restore the 10-day reflection period and the requirement for two witnesses to the way those safeguards were originally instituted under Bill C-14.

Honourable senators, one of our primary responsibilities as senators is to protect the vulnerable and represent their views in this chamber. We need to look out for those vulnerable people now. Let us retain those crucial safeguards to at least try to ensure that Canadians are properly protected under this legislation.