To address that, I would direct the committee to legal principles in a couple of areas of our case law and legislation, starting with Carter. In the trial decision in Carter, the trial judge defined palliative care and assisted dying separately.
The court defined palliative care as treatments aimed at alleviating suffering. It aims to neither hasten nor postpone death but affirms life and regards dying as a normal process. That was at paragraph 41 of that decision. Assisted dying, on the other hand, involves the intentional termination of the life of a person at their request.
Those practices were recognized as distinct in Carter. Palliative care exists to improve the quality of life throughout life and throughout the natural dying process. MAID involves an intentional act to terminate the life of a patient at their request. In fact, in Carter, the trial court, after reviewing the evidence, observed that adequate palliative care can reduce requests for euthanasia or lead to their retraction.
That also led to another—