If you look historically at the situations in which life could be taken, and I'm talking here about civilized societies and societies we would equate ourselves with in Canada, they were all situations where it was thought necessary to take life to save human life. Indeed, it's actually the trial judge in Carter who gives the example of self-defence: the reason you may kill without legal punishment in self-defence is that it's necessary to save innocent human life. It's the same with just war. It was the same originally with abortion; it was to save the mother's life. It's the same with capital punishment, because it was believed that if somebody had killed once, they would kill again.
Respect for life is not just a religious concept. We've used religion in the past—and this is what I said in my remarks—to uphold it, but it's not fundamentally just a religious concept.
The book that's best on this is by Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher, who points out that it is a foundational value in every society in which you would want to live. The question becomes, does our legalization of physicians, putting it bluntly, killing their patients—because that's what they're doing—derogate from upholding the value of respect for life in society in general to such a serious degree that we shouldn't do it, even though we can understand why the person might want that and even though they're exercising their autonomy?
First of all, because I believe there are other completely set ways to deal with the suffering of the person, I've promoted that a health care professional leaving someone in serious pain is a breach of human rights. That's now recognized, for example by the WHO, by the World Medical Association, by the Canadian Pain Society, etc.
It's not that I want to leave people to suffer, but I just think that when you have the institution of medicine, which for 2,500 years has said that they will never kill, and which upholds the value of respect for life in society in general, and you've had a law, and the law of all societies like Canada says that you must not kill—that's what our Criminal Code says—and which upholds the value of respect for life, should we be derogating from that with this?