Thank you.
You won't be surprised if I want to stay on the legal aspect of the issue. To go back to your answer on what we should be considering if a physician or a health care provider does not comply with the law that Parliament may adopt in relation to physician-assisted death or euthanasia, should we stick to the penalties of the code as they are now, or should we take into consideration that, looking into the decision of the court, there could be mitigating circumstances in relation to either counselling suicide or being part of it? As you know, those are two different offences.
In relation to the doctor, per se, should it not be a way to find a middle ground, considering that we are in a different context—there is a special relationship here, as both the doctor and Ms. Hickey recognized—and considering that this is a profession ruled by a professional order? In other words, there is an element in there that would not exist in non-physician-assisted death; I mean in the regular lives of citizens. If somebody like me advised somebody to commit suicide, I am not a doctor, I am not there to provide any kind of professional advice in terms of health.
Should we not consider that there is a middle ground, and propose in our report to Parliament that in cases of breaches of the law that we are drafting there should be some elements to consider in terms of the penalties, either as mitigating factors or as different scales of penalty?