I would be hesitant to overgeneralize in terms of the community as a whole. I have been involved in these issues for 25 years on behalf of the disability community, which is a very diverse community including members who are on all sides of this debate. I spent seven years as the chair of human rights with the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, which is Canada's largest disability rights advocacy organization. I have been engaged in this debate from all sides and all angles.
I don't think it is fair to say simply that the perspectives of the people you are hearing here are coming from one monolithic viewpoint. What I would say is that there is a generally held consensus about a lack of effective oversight and sufficiently precise measures to give effect to what the Supreme Court of Canada has said.
I am not trying to relitigate what the Supreme Court of Canada said. I may try to clarify it. For example, when I say that it didn't commit a right to die—it didn't commit a right to euthanasia, and it didn't commit a right to assisted suicide—that is the reality. People may try to advocate other viewpoints, but the reality of what the court did and had the power to do was not that. What it did was strike down as unconstitutional a Criminal Code prohibition against either culpable homicide or assisted suicide. That is what it did. That was its jurisdiction. Then it went on to address various other points. In terms of that issue of blanket immunity, we have talked about it in that context.
The Supreme Court of Canada made this point clearly, and I urge it on this issue and also on the question of advance directives. Despite what I have heard here today, the Supreme Court of Canada did address the question of advance directives clearly. They said they were concerned that there was a need for actual consent at the time of the act and, for that reason, they were not prepared to engage in and allow for advance directives as part of their ruling.
It is not that they didn't address it. On the contrary, they addressed it squarely, and they said that there needs to be clear voluntary consent at the time of the act in order to allow for this measure to proceed. In that context, that applies both to the question of advance directives and to the issue of immunity that I was speaking about earlier. How do you determine that there is actually clear, voluntary, uncoerced consent at the time of the act when you are allowing third parties effective immunity to engage in providing people with medications, often weeks, hours, or months after the time of a prescription, to effectively end their lives? You can't. It is entirely impossible to enforce.