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Laurie in Debate

Bill 40: Personal Directives Amendment Act, 2007.

Bill 40: Personal Directives Amendment Act, 2007 debate in the 26th Legislature of Alberta, 3rd Session by Ms. Laurie Blakeman, MLA Edmonton-Centre

Alberta Hansard – December 04, 2007

The Speaker: The hon. Member for Edmonton-Centre.

Ms Blakeman: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I’m pleased to be able to get a chance to speak to this bill in third reading. I haven’t been able to get on the list prior to this. I’m really glad to see this bill come before the Legislature. It’s important for a number of reasons.

I have had a number of constituents ask for improvements in a series of acts that affect dependent adults: the Public Trustee Act, the public guardian, and the Personal Directives Act. That, of course, also brings into play the Dependent Adults Act because we have a situation now where I think some seniors have been or certainly feel that they have been unfairly categorized under one of those acts, in which they are essentially declared incompetent or not able to manage their own affairs and make choices about their own lives. A number of these individuals say: well, you know, I might have had a bad time for a while, but I’m okay now, and now I find out that I’ve lost the right to control my own life, even to choose who I socialize with or where I live or how my money is handled. So this Personal Directives Act is one piece in a puzzle.

I have I think it’s eight high-rise apartments that are dedicated to seniors’ independent living in my constituency. Plus, I have a number of seniors who completely live independently on their own in the community. So lots of people who are getting on in years but are still looking after themselves or are partially still in control of their life and choices, and these acts are really important to them. Aside from that, I have also had constituents – I’m thinking of one particular story where the couple had actually come here from a different province in which a personal directive was not only allowed, but you were able to register it and it had effect. They were very frustrated when one of the couple had a heart attack on the sidewalk and emergency personnel came. Of course, there’s no way to inform emergency personnel that you have a personal directive that says: don’t revive me if I have a heart attack and fall down on the sidewalk. The emergency medical personnel are charged to revive you, and there’s nothing that would allow them to not revive you.

So we have a missing link here. Even where we do have some-thing like a revised Personal Directives Act, we still are missing that link between having that piece of paper that sets out how we want our personal health matters to be organized and handled if we’re not competent to do so and having a direct link to those health providers and having it have some standing with them. Even if this individual I’m talking about, you know, had sort of collapsed on the sidewalk holding their personal directive out in their arms and going, “ Please deal with me this way,” the medical personnel could not have honoured it.

We need to keep working forward on this legislation. What has been done here today in Bill 40, the Personal Directives Amendment Act, 2007, are steps in the right direction. We’ve got things like a simplification and a standardization of the process for actually writing these personal directives that actually is based on a legislative review. It is setting out a way to determine regained capacity. We’ve just had a particular episode, that was actually championed by the Elder Advocates of Alberta, with a woman who had to go to court to try and regain her independence because she was deemed under the Dependent Adults Act not to be mentally competent to look after her own affairs. She was able to fight it out in court to regain some of her independence and some of the choices over her life.

I’m pleased to see that this does set out regulations, not legislation, for personal directives that do set out a process for determining regained capacity, care of minor children, a voluntary registry, and a number of other things. These are all the correct steps in the right direction, but we’re still missing a number of other linkages that would make this a truly effective, all-encompassing act that fits in well and works well with those other acts, those being the Public Trustee Act, the public guardian, and the Dependent Adults Act. I’m aware that my colleague did try hard to amend the act and wasn’t successful, and I’m sure that when she spoke, she talked about what her amendment was trying to do. Specifically, she was trying to make sure that where a problem had been identified, which is also anticipated in this act, there would be a requirement that an investigation flow from that, and right now we don’t have it. We have an obligation that when someone feels there might be a problem, they should take action, but it doesn’t specifically say that there has to be an investigation, and I think that’s part of the concern.

I have a number of constituents who have expressed a real interest in this act. I think they had high hopes that it was going to accomplish more than it actually does. The overriding concern that seems to be brought up most frequently around dependent adults is their ability to reverse that process and to prove their competence again, and that’s a hard fight. There are very severe tests. The bar is set very high under certain pieces of legislation and no bar at all exists in other pieces of legislation where they could, you know, prove their ability to take back parts of their lives. It can be truly worrying.

I have a request from a person who is a constituent, but it’s a third party who’s requesting me to take action on their behalf. I can’t until I can get a release signed by the individual, and we can’t get access to the individual in the nursing home they’re in because they’re now in there under the Dependent Adults Act. So it becomes a very uncomfortable situation.

I’m pleased to see this. Thank you for the opportunity to let me speak to it. It is an important act for my constituents. I hope we will see passage of this but also that we’ll continue to work forward on the rest of what we need.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.