I'll maybe draw the committee's attention to Minister Philpott's intervention on this matter, because I think this was a guiding consideration for the government. In looking at this there were effectively three choices: to have a fixed timeline under which death could take place, which is within six months or a year; to have no timeline whatsoever; or to have what the bill has—to provide some latitude for medical practitioners, in each individual case, to make that kind of judgment. I think the government's decision was to go for that option because six months or twelve months would be somewhat arbitrary. I think the committee's going to hear from a lot of experts.
The alternative, really, would be to have no constraints whatsoever on this notion of reasonably foreseeable death. As the ministers noted, I think that's where there were a lot of concerns about safeguards for the vulnerable, about how it becomes a much more complex undertaking to figure out how you strike the right balance among all the competing interests if you don't have that kind of limitation. It was a choice, and admittedly there may be unique individual circumstances that present themselves. However, I think the idea was to give some latitude to medical practitioners to look at the totality of evidence and make the decision. I reiterate what the minister said.