Thank you, Mr. Chair.
This is an amendment based on recommendations that the committee heard from a couple of witnesses from the Barreau du Québec as well as from Peter Hogg. He was not at this committee. He testified at the Special Joint Committee on Physician-Assisted Dying back in January. Peter Hogg is, of course, one of Canada's leading constitutional law experts.
To save time, I won't read out all three clauses. You have them in front of you. The essence of this is to ensure that there are provisions to allow equivalency in recognizing the federal law for medically-assisted death with provincial laws.
I'll just quote from Professor Hogg at this point:
The advantage of doing that is that it would avoid overlapping legislation. Also, if you don't do something like that, issues of conflict between the federal and provincial law will be quite complicated, and they will be resolved by the rule of federal paramountcy. That would be a bad situation. I think it can be resolved by a so-called equivalence provision.
What I've drafted is based on many precedents in other federal laws where one can assess that the provincial law under consideration is sufficiently equivalent to what's being put in place federally that we'll avoid federal-provincial conflict of jurisdiction in this area. I hope you'll consider this amendment. Thank you.