As Ms. Gibson said, it's true that in clinical practice one could call on any one of a number of disciplines. I think the reason for talking about palliative care consultation per se is that palliative care more than any other discipline in medicine is implicitly multidisciplinary. We would have people who have expertise to tap into the psychosocial, existential, spiritual and physical sources and dimensions of suffering.
I think the other reason to mandate a consultation—and again, not just for people who request a medically hastened death but for all dying patients who have intolerable suffering—is that if it is mandated and if the information collected then is entered into an anonymized national database, it provides the basis for Canada's five-year review.
Parliament is committed to a five-year review. If we don't do something a priori to start collecting that information, five years from now what will there be to review? What are we going to say? Are we simply going to say, here's the number of people who have done it and there don't appear to have been any complaints? I say that is not enough; I think we need to be thinking not only about the next five years, but the five years after that, and we need to have some information available to provide the basis for Parliament's review.