Yes, I spoke about this, of course, in the first consultation. It is a concern. The reason it's a concern is that in our population, end-of-life palliative care isn't necessarily for an elderly population. We have multiple deaths in our communities. We have multiple suicides. We have young people who are dying. It's a real issue in our communities that we have a lot of people dying in the younger populations.
When you think about physician-assisted dying, you think about what message that might send in a community where you've just had a number of youths who may have committed suicide or who have been in motor vehicle accidents. It might not be as accepted. It might not be something that is welcomed. That's why I was speaking to really communicating what physician-assisted dying could mean in communities and to really engaging communities around this. If you want it to be accessible, it's going to have to be well communicated.
You talked about access. Who would access it? Where might it make sense to have access to it? I can see it being used in cases where you have.... We talk about this concept of not wanting someone to “die hard”. If you have a terminally ill patient who is suffering, I could see a family wanting to access a physician-assisted death, but it would be in a very particular circumstance, because we don't want someone to suffer and die hard, if you see what I mean.
There are circumstances where I could see that access being welcomed, and then there are some circumstances where, if a community has just had some very tragic losses, I could see them not wanting anything to do with physician-assisted death. It's really about context, understanding the community, and understanding where it would be something that's acceptable and where it would not be acceptable.