Thank you, Mr. Arseneault, for that question. I'm sorry I cannot answer you in French. I'll do my best in English.
I think the detailed answer is in this report, which you have received already, the report of the expert panel on MAID and mental illness. I'm not going to be able to go over that in five minutes, but I want to reassure you again, as I mentioned previously, that in court this has been tried, not with a bunch of opinions but with cross-examination demanding hard evidence.
The hard evidence in the Truchon case was that there is a vigorous and strict process in place for MAID in Canada that has no problems with that. Second, physicians are able to distinguish between a suicidal patient and a patient seeking medical assistance in dying. Those are established facts from the courts.
We have no difficulty making these facts known when we are in court because there you must not just have opinions; you must have facts, and the facts can be tried. There can be cross-examination and new evidence for jurors.
I want to assure you that as a practising psychiatrist, we see people who have suicidal thinking all the time. It's part and parcel of psychiatry. I personally have no problems separating a patient who is having suicidal ideation from a person who is seeking MAID. For one thing, the person seeking MAID has probably been suffering with psychiatric illness for eight to 10 years. We're not talking here about an 18-year-old woman who suddenly got depressed and is having suicidal thoughts and is looking for MAID. That kind of patient is not what we're talking about. We're talking about people who have suffered interminably over a number of years.