Surely, any amendment to the Criminal Code that says these are the conditions under which conduct that otherwise meets the definition of a crime shall be free from criminal liability is exclusively the responsibility of Parliament.
There is a variety of ways that Parliament can go about that. It can put very little in such an exemption. It could say, for instance, that so long as the conduct is in accordance with a very detailed provincial law, then that will result in an exemption for criminal purposes for the same conduct; or Parliament could say that for the criminal exemption to apply, it is going to determine to which offences it applies and it is going to determine under what circumstances it applies. With respect to the fundamental circumstances in which physician-assisted dying would be available, there's a very strong claim that it is Parliament's jurisdiction as a matter of criminal law.
The other aspects of Quebec's legislation are really the protective, safeguarding measures. There are things like the steps that the physicians must take in working with a patient who's made a request or the documents that have to be filled out. Once they have been completed, the documents are sent to the commission for the purposes of a compliance review, data collection, and monitoring so that the public can have confidence that physician-assisted dying is being administered in a safe way and is being administered in accordance with the objectives of the legislation. Those are the kinds of elements where it's more challenging to determine which level of government is the best place to do them. Maybe some of those protective features could be done by both levels of government, at which point you want to balance duplication of effort with ensuring that whatever Parliament thinks is necessary from a federal perspective is present.
In that regard, one of the things that I would bring to your attention is in relation to the compliance assessment function, which most physician-assisted dying statutes have. The body that would be referred a case, when non-compliance has been found, could be either the medical colleges responsible for governing the behaviour of physicians or it could be the police or the prosecution service. You will see in a variety of statutes that sometimes they say exactly who the reference should be made to when non-compliance has been found.
In terms of Canadian jurisdiction, the regulation of physicians is a provincial and territorial responsibility. Policing and prosecutions are also primarily a provincial responsibility, though in the territories they are more of a federal responsibility. There's an added complication there. That's something you might want to keep in mind when the committee is considering which level of government is best placed to do certain functions.