Medical Assistance in Dying and Race-Based Data

How can legislators and parliamentarians make informed decisions while also ensuring that correct and meaningful policies are being put in place, without any data? How do we even begin to solve our problems and prevent them from festering, without any information?

Recently, I successfully moved an amendment to Bill C-7 - Medical Assistance in Dying, that will extend the powers of Health Canada to allow for the collection of race-based data to be systematically collected on a national level. The amendment also called for the data to be used to identify race-based inequities and how race intersects with other forms of systemic inequality in medical assistance in dying.