The first thing I would say is that this would only come about, I believe, if there were agreement among provinces and territories and the federal government that this was desirable. Each province and territory—as is the case in other jurisdictions in the United States and internationally where physician-assisted dying is provided for—would have its own machinery for collecting data and looking back at cases of physician-assisted dying when those have occurred. In any event, in various jurisdictions deaths already need to be recorded, and they are the subject, at least, of statistical reports.
What would be of interest here, and I expect that we will talk about this at the federal-provincial-territorial working group table, is whether there is interest in an aggregated oversight function. While it is possible that Health Canada could take on that function, I think it would likely make more sense for some sort of arm's-length capacity to pursue it and for it to be done in conjunction with the existing health data and statistics agencies, such as Statistics Canada, the Canadian Institute for Health Information, and so on.
I think that at this point it is certainly not a proposition that Health Canada has imagined we would pursue unilaterally. However, it seems that in the report there is some very strong interest in having what I'll call an oversight mechanism, but it would also be a body that would collect information about cases of physician-assisted dying that have taken place in the country with a view to examining the circumstances and helping to get at some of these issues, such as how one defines an “irremediable” condition, whether or not there is guidance for practitioners that could be elaborated upon, and so on.
I think we would see it as something that could be useful, particularly in the early days of a physician-assisted dying regime being in place in Canada.