Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Ladies, welcome to your Parliament.
I don't want to tell you my life story, but I will say that I was a provincial member of the Quebec National Assembly for the past seven years, and as such I witnessed the work of the commission, and the work that led up to the adoption of that law. I was there right from the beginning and I am one of the 120 members who voted for it.
You mentioned, quite rightly, that this was often a battle of definitions. That is quite true, because in certain cases we talk about “physician-assisted dying”, whereas in Quebec the act that was passed refers to “end-of-life care”. We are talking about exactly the same thing, but with totally different words. Since we are legislators and the Supreme Court has ordered us to adopt a law, we have to bear in mind that words are very important.
In Quebec, they talk about “grievous and irremediable health problems” causing “persistent and intolerable suffering”. In your opinion, should the law the federal government will be putting forward for us to adopt include a definition of those words, that expression, so that we know what we are talking about?