I have a quick response to Mr. Fraser's comments. I do want to make sure that before they vote on this, members have read the amendment. What Mr. Fraser implied was that the Minister of Health, with the Minster of Justice, would be reviewing the cases. That's not at all what the amendment says. However you vote, please read the amendment through. The amendment says that in the absence of a province designating an authority for the purposes of advance review, the Minister of Health, in conjunction with the Minister of Justice, would designate an authority for that purpose. It is simply to get around the absence of that designation. I am in no way proposing that the Minister of Health would make those decisions.
Mr. Fraser said that we had dealt with this yesterday. We didn't deal with this yesterday. This is substantively different in terms of the process. This doesn't require or even mention judicial review. It certainly does not imply that these would be political decisions. What it does say is that there would be some kind of prior review conducted by competent legal authority.
For those who say that health care professionals make these kinds of decisions every day, no, they don't. My wife is a physician. She doesn't make decisions about who gets to take their life every day. She doesn't make complex legal decisions every day on criteria that legal scholars can't even agree might apply or might not apply. Physicians don't make those decisions every day; physicians don't make those kinds of decisions ever. These are very complex legal questions. Therefore, I think it is a modest proposal to say that the people who have been trained and identified as having the competency to make complex legal decisions be the ones who are making those decisions.