Certainly, senator. In my brief, I refer to the position taken by the Collège des médecins du Québec, the experience of Belgium and the Netherlands, and the reports of experts in psychiatry who are proposing measures. I am thinking of the Association des médecins psychiatres du Québec, which has produced a voluminous document talking about the measures to be put in place, among others. I think the experts have to be involved in this.
On the question of minors, in the Netherlands and Belgium, for example, in addition to the two physicians, there is a requirement to have an opinion from a pediatric psychiatrist or a psychiatrist on the minor's maturity. You have to understand that adolescents aged 14 to 18 years are not immature. On the contrary, these young people, who have been very sick, are often possessed of a maturity that most young people their age do not have. It is therefore wrong to think that because they are under 18, they are not competent to consent to medical assistance in dying. As physicians or specialists, we are capable of properly assessing that competence to consent to medical assistance in dying.
These are in fact clienteles for whom we have to have additional safeguarding measures, in addition to those we already have.