I appreciate the concerns about cost and timeliness. However, the Supreme Court saw fit January 15 to impose judicial oversight rather than turning it over to two doctors to make this decision, so the Supreme Court must have felt a lot was at stake in terms of ensuring the constitutional protections of the right to life of vulnerable persons. That's how I think we could understand that decision.
I don't think it's a long-term solution, but because of the risks and because of the duty of Parliament to ensure the constitutional protection for the right to life of vulnerable persons, from our perspective the options are to do that or to put in place the tribunal option that has been proposed in extensive detail by Gilbert Sharpe and David Baker.
In terms of the critique that it makes it a legal decision, well, I think it is. The court said it didn't strike down a ban on assisted suicide. It provided that, in very specific circumstances, there could be legal exemptions to that ban. So there is a legal determination to be made. One half of the equation is a medical equation: Does someone meet the medical criteria? The other half of the equation is whether they meet sufficiently the criteria for the exemption to the Criminal Code prohibition on assisted suicide.
That's why from our perspective, certainly reasonable foreseeable natural death is not a medical category. Don't expect physicians to be trained in assessing reasonable foreseeable natural death. Reasonable foreseeability is a legal term, and so it should be, because we're providing an exemption to a ban on assisted suicide.