I used that language because Carter can be construed very narrowly. It seems to me there is a pre-emptive discussion for including other individuals, such as children and minors, and other types of conditions, for example, through the advance directive, all at this time pre-emptively, in anticipation that there might be a charter challenge.
We know there could be a charter challenge simply because of the nature of the arguments that were made in Carter. Many arguments can be made on the section 7 right-to-life argument that unless they have this down the road, they will take their lives sooner. Many things can fall into that.
Because there wasn't any data in the Carter case with respect to minors, for example, and there was no discussion on advance directives.... I know there's this idea floating around about the floor and ceiling. I'm not particularly fond of that analogy, metaphor, or whatever you would call it. I think that we need data. We need to understand.
Even with Belgium there's controversy, but we're looking at something similar to a Belgian scheme. I think right from the beginning of the trial decision we were looking at a Dutch-Belgian scheme in Canada. There's no secret to that.
In Belgium when they looked, for example, at children, they put their law in place in 2002 and didn't start thinking about minors, other than emancipated minors, until 12 years later, so they had time to actually gather data and look at the evidence. That data around minors is simply not before the Supreme Court.
The decisions and the arguments around sections 7 and 15 are based on experiences with respect to adults who are requesting a particular service, a termination-of-life service, and we don't know how the essence of those arguments is transferrable to minor children. It's as simple as that.
When I say “first iteration”, I'm not sure.... If the argument is that we can move forward with this because there's only a handful of people that it involves, let's be prudent and not rush to put it all in. Let's gather some information. We're Canada. We're not the Netherlands. We're not Belgium.