Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Please forgive me, I understood everything you said, except for the question you asked at the end of your comment.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  With your permission, I am going to reply in English.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Because the answer is very technical. You are very correct. I may have misspoken. I generalized slightly when I indicated that euthanasia was a term that's well defined. It is well defined, but there are subcategories of euthanasia. In the context of the Carter case, the court was only ever speaking of what could be called “voluntary euthanasia”, which involves the person who asks being competent to make the decision.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I think the areas in which there is the most scope for overlap relate to the procedural safeguards, things like the physician needing to assess the patient's mental competency, the physician needing to have discussions with the patient on several occasions, the patient needing to fill in a form that is signed and dated and witnessed by at least three independent witnesses.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I know that this committee will be hearing from our colleagues at Health Canada in the coming days. Many of these questions might be better put to them, because through their federal, provincial, and territorial contacts, they will be most closely working with the provincial and territorial health ministries.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I don't think so, other than to say that, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, the criminal jurisdiction is exclusively federal. As my colleague mentioned, there is litigation that's currently suspended in relation to Quebec's law. That's still ongoing. It will be revived either at the time of the expiry of the Supreme Court suspension, which was just extended for four months, as this committee may know, or upon the coming into force of new federal legislation.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Surely, any amendment to the Criminal Code that says these are the conditions under which conduct that otherwise meets the definition of a crime shall be free from criminal liability is exclusively the responsibility of Parliament. There is a variety of ways that Parliament can go about that.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I'll start with the second part of your question, which I think was about the jurisdiction responsible for that. Which types of facilities may engage in which types of health care practices, and so on, is probably predominantly a provincial and territorial matter. The regulation of doctors and physicians, and what each is able to do—I know that some provinces have nurses who are able to do some functions that are otherwise limited to physicians—are parts of provincial and territorial regulation.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Unfortunately, I am not in a position to explain the minister's reasoning. I can however say that one of the reasons why the constitutionality of the Quebec law raises questions is the fact that the issue is a matter of shared jurisdiction, and criminal law is of exclusive federal jurisdiction.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  All I can really share with the committee is that there are different ways of reading and interpreting the Supreme Court ruling. Some ways focus on the dictionary definition of the key terms and some ways may focus more on a contextual reading of the case. For instance, there's a variety of places in the court's ruling where they talk about physician-assisted dying in a manner that compares it to other end-of-life decision-making, so that might suggest to some that they were thinking in more of an end-of-life context.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I don't know of any that have a similar constitutional framework. That said, there certainly are many other jurisdictions that have considered legislation in this area. There are other models you might wish to look at, but none where I'm aware of...their constitutional frameworks.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  The Parliament of the United Kingdom has looked at this issue quite a few times over the last 20 years. They had a parliamentary committee study the issue in the mid-2000s, I believe. They also recently had something akin to a private member's bill that was debated and was defeated I believe in September of last year.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  That's the only one of that sort that I'm aware of. I believe there also have been some bills studied recently by the legislature of Scotland, and probably also in a number of jurisdictions in Australia. I haven't looked at those very closely. There are also always a handful under debate in legislatures in the various U.S. states.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  In the Canadian context, the jurisdictional difficulties will be a big challenge. In all the other places, one level of government makes all the decisions and really administers the regime. In Canada, because the regulation of the health practice, the health delivery, is under provincial and territorial jurisdiction but the criminal law is under federal jurisdiction, I think a very big challenge will be deciding which aspects of a physician-assisted dying regime are best dealt with at the federal criminal level and which elements are best dealt with at the provincial level.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today as the committee begins its study of the very difficult, complex, and profound question of physician-assisted dying. Before I get going, I would just apologize for not having available my opening remarks in both English and French, which I know the committee likes to see.