I think the first thing I would say is when we talk about vulnerable people, there seems to be this dialogue that there are vulnerable people, and then there are people who are suffering and need help to die. They are the same group of people. People who are suffering intolerably and have enduring suffering are also very vulnerable.
If there's some question as to the policies and protocols that need to be developed within medical practice to deal with advanced consent of mature, competent minors, I would say for our organization—and we have worked on this issue for decades—the issue of mental illness as a sole criteria and competent minors is a fairly new component to the discussion. Even for us, it's fairly new.
I think it's not unreasonable for the government to need more time to understand, through more consultation with people who are going to be social workers and medical health care providers, how parameters can be developed to ensure we're not discriminating against people arbitrarily based on age, or arbitrarily based on their medical condition.
In the legislation, in the preamble and the non-legislative component, the government has indicated they would study this within five years. That feels for a lot of us that's just kicking the can down a dead-end road. There was a sincere commitment and understanding that there may be a need to have some thorough discussion to understand what those policies and protocols might be, and that there be a timeline of 18 months to strike a committee, and I would say in the next three months to study and report back with legislative guidelines. We don't have all those answers, but at the same time, we don't want to arbitrarily exclude people and not find ways to ensure their Charter of Rights will not be violated.