Thank you very much for what are in effect two excellent questions. I would like to take your first one up first.
Your poignant story about your mother-in-law reminds us that the fatal weakness of the whole concept of advance consent is the unsupported assumption that the loss of a legal capacity and perhaps the loss of verbal abilities must necessarily be accompanied by the loss of the ability to change your mind. In fact, the fatal flaw of the advance consent argument is that what you're in essence doing is telling the person who's becoming increasingly incapable—and this is often a gradual process—when you are no longer to communicate in a way that we are going to recognize, we're going to take away your right to change your mind. I think that this is the last thing that the drafters of this law would have intended. I think that it's extremely prudent that they have stayed away from enabling the decisions you make in one physical state and under one set of circumstances to rule tyrannically over you, potentially resulting in your wrongful death, but a wrongful death that cannot be discerned externally.
Taking you up on the next point, it is true that the strongest possible statement of conscience rights would be contained in a section of the Criminal Code that actually provided not just a ringing endorsement of the section 2 charter right to conscience—which has never been properly supported in jurisprudence that I'm aware of—but also actual penalties for discrimination against a person who was contemplating entering a health care profession, was in a health care profession, or was in any way involved in the care of a patient, where that person was being coerced to either renounce their determination not to participate in assisted suicide and euthanasia or to in any other way disadvantage that person. I would, of course, heartily endorse such a thing. As a balance for this amazing innovation in Canadian law about a statement of exemption from criminal prosecution, which is as groundbreaking as the rewrite of section 241, I think that it would be appropriate for it to be accompanied by an equally groundbreaking assertion of conscience rights.
I would challenge the committee to take this up as a special issue, because this is not the last contentious thing that's going to come before us. Medical science and genetics will deliver so many more contentious questions to us in the future. Are the conscience rights of the relevant professionals or involved practitioners to be thrown under the bus every time a new access right is declared by a court or by Parliament? The time has come to decouple conscience rights from access rights. This could most effectively be begun by a ringing endorsement of conscience rights and the protection of them in the Criminal Code.