A few weeks ago, I attended a panel discussion and community meeting organized by MPs Charlie Angus and Paul Dewar. At the time, I didn’t realize that the duo had been organizing such town halls in locations across Canada and that upwards of 100 people attended each one. In the depths of winter and on beautiful sunny spring days, people came out to talk about death, dying and palliative care.
After the meeting, I emailed Charlie Angus to see if I could meet with him to talk about how to further community engagement on palliative care. (Yes, it was one of those moments, assisted by the internet, that I overcame my introvert shyness!) To my surprise and pleasure, his executive assistant responded quickly, setting up a meeting for this Tuesday.
I arrived, carrying a copy of my new book and my report on Death, Dying and Canadian Families, and we settled into the chairs and couch in his office. I made a remark about his omnipresent guitar (he’s famous for pulling it out and improvising a song almost at the drop of a hat!) and we bonded over guitars to break the ice. But we soon got down to business.
I asked him how he saw us moving forward with the campaign to secure hospice palliative care for all Canadians, and how I might help with those efforts. He is clearly passionate about these issues and has already received virtually unanimous support for his motion to develop a national palliative care strategy. And his party, the NDP, has made palliative care one of the planks of their election strategy. They will be trying to make palliative care an election issue in the federal campaign this summer and fall.
As he noted, palliative care is a difficult issue “to get traction on.” Assisted suicide gets lots more air time in the media. And it’s much simpler to get people mobilized for and against. But hospice palliative care will affect every Canadian in one way or another during their lifetimes, and it’s an issue, we agreed, can’t be allowed to be neglected.
It was exciting to see a politician so genuinely committed to an issue. And so willing to talk about ways in which I, as a private citizen (and writer and activist and PhD) can help to forward hospice palliative care. While we can’t (and don’t want to) speak on behalf of our specific organizations, we can speak as citizens, as beneficiaries of hospice palliative services, and, in my case at least, as a member of the population of aging Baby Boomers.
When I wrote back to his E.A. after the meeting to thank them for taking the time with me, he immediately wrote back to say “thank you for making the time to meet with us.” And, he added, let us know how we can support your efforts.
All of us who are committed to hospice palliative care can speak out, contact our politicians, show up at local debates to raise the issue, write letters to the editor, hold community meetings and discussions – the list is endless. In this way we can ensure that all Canadians have access to the high quality hospice palliative care we need.
Let me know what you think!
Hospice Volunteering 