Yes. Essentially, what section 15 says is that sometimes differential treatment is required for equality.
Now, we have various unresolved issues with respect to mental illness, as you've pointed out, and equality doesn't mean that you have to ignore those. If you, as a committee and a Parliament, decide that mental illness as the sole underlying condition presents special problems of prognosis, irremediability and suicidality, then drawing a distinction on that basis is not necessarily going to be found to be discriminatory by a court.
In fact, as you've heard, there's a competing equality consideration that you've heard from disability rights organizations that say removing criminal protection from this group rests on an ableist principle that their lives are not worth living and that death is a better option for them. I commend Dr. Isabel Grant's section 15 article about that very thing.
What I want to emphasize, however, and what my colleague and friend, Dr. Gilbert, neglected to talk about, is that the very first thing you have to prove under a section 15 analysis is that there's a benefit under law. You don't even get to the equality test, the two-part equality test, unless you can show that, and the variation through the provinces.... We have Alberta now passing its own legislation. Quebec has its own legislation.
Provinces are the ones that provide MAID. Even accepting that MAID provision is a benefit, this is not under the federal law. The federal law is only granting an exemption to criminalization. Therefore, section 15 may not even apply here.