Thank you for the question. It's a very good one.
I think there needs to be more.... Our proposal is not to simply send someone to the Yellow Pages, far from it. Our doctors are committed to the life and well-being of their patients, so they would want to maintain the physician-patient relationship. They would want to discuss this important decision with their patients. They would want to spend time determining what the reason for the request is. They would also want to ensure that the patient was able to get the assessment if they so desired it. They would not want to stand in the way of that.
We should not be talking in this country about simply having an operator at the end of the phone who is going to give someone a number. In my view, we should be responding compassionately to these people, because many of these people will need services, support, and help. This service that is anticipated by the Canadian Medical Association, and similarly, I think, in the provincial-territorial expert advisory group recommendations, would be for support services to be made available and for this person to get an appropriate assessment in a thorough way. We're not talking about sending someone to the Yellow Pages; this is in a thorough way.
I think something like this is really important in a more remote community, because even in a remote community you might have one doctor or two doctors. Both might be people who are not prepared to participate in assisted death. This means that it would be important for that individual to be able to get access to this service, and I think the responsibility is on government to ensure that service is available and provided.