Dr. Stern, you were very helpful during our Senate/House deliberations. You were equally helpful today. I take your testimony very seriously because, of course, as you say, you're on the front lines. You're at the intersection of medicine and law, and you're the ones who decide whether a doctor is going to get coverage if they're sued for trying to implement this law in good faith.
We didn't have an opportunity to read your very careful submissions in advance. I want to make sure we do justice to them.
I want to pursue something that Mr. McKinnon and you were discussing, namely, the issue of Bill C-14 trying to provide clarity through the words “reasonably foreseeable”, which it seems most witnesses have told us has not occurred. You make a couple of suggestions depending on which way we want to turn, namely, to add the words, “whether or not death is imminent” or otherwise.
In the testimony and legal commentary, many of us have been hearing about the implications of the Carter decision, the Supreme Court case, and that it was deliberately not to be left to terminal patients, not to be limited to people at the end of life. The justices were deliberate in their choice of the words, “grievously and irremediably ill patient”. There was no suggestion of terminality.
The euphemism that their natural death has become “reasonably foreseeable”, it will be argued, is inconsistent with what the Supreme Court said. If that's accurate, then your choice about adding the phrase “whether or not death is imminent” is a non-starter. With respect, I would say that the alternative that you're suggesting for this provision, that “natural death has become reasonably foreseeable and is expected to be imminent”, is equally ambiguous.
I'm not quite sure where to land on this. Other witnesses, such as Mr. Ménard from Quebec, said yesterday that we should just eliminate this section, because it adds nothing. We've heard today that it's neither legal nor medical.
I'm wondering why your recommendation didn't simply say to get rid of that ambiguity, we should delete that phrase.