Thank you, Madam Chair. I have some questions on this. The bill, obviously, I support, and I think the intent of the bill has a lot of support in the communities, especially with senior citizens. It is about empowering people to make decisions about how they want to be cared for when they somehow get incapacitated for medical reasons or other reasons. I think that it is a good thing for the people to be given the power to write a living will, as it is called, to lay out what we want done to us, or not done to us, when we are not able to make decisions for ourselves.
There is much objection to the bill; in fact, there is a lot of support. Where the concerns are -- and there were many during our committee review process -- was the fact that the people that are going to be required to deliver this, if somebody has a living will that says I don't want to be left on a breathing machine if I am not conscious anymore, or I don't want to be in a situation where all sorts of things...this bill will give you the power to make that decision.
Everybody has different notions about what kind of quality of life they want to have. The thing is, it will be the doctors and the nurses and whoever other caregivers might be in these health centres, hospitals or private homes, who have to carry that out. There has to be somebody who has to unplug that. There will be lots of things that these people will have to do, and I am just really disappointed that nowhere during this process was anyone from the NWT Medical Association or the Registered Nurses' Association contacted.
From a common sense point of view, when we are sitting on this side of the House -- and we had a debate on TTC and many other things -- we like to think that department people, with all the apparatuses that they have, and hundreds of people that work on writing a bill, and think of an idea, and carry out policy, that they would be talking to each other. We often learn that that is not the case at all.
I just want to make note of the fact that the department could have done a better job in consulting with those health care professionals, but this has been pointed out to the Minister, and the Minister made a commitment, during our committee process, that they are going to be setting
up some kind of training program, and they will be partnering with the Nurses' Association and other health care professionals to do that. I just want to get a commitment from the Minister, again, that he will make sure that all those parties are involved in a serious and substantive way, and that his department will work with them to make sure that those people who have to carry these out, are going to be well trained, well informed, and well involved. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.