Mr. Speaker, I sat through a number of meetings at the justice committee where we brought forth many amendments to the bill. The amendment the member speaks of is a good amendment. I am not denying that at all. However, it still does not codify protection for conscience rights in the law.
One of the things we heard repeatedly was that we should have consistency across the country, and in order to ensure consistency across the country, we do feel that there should be codified conscience rights. When we talk about consistency, we often talk about it as consistency to access. We want to make sure that is indeed the case, but on the other side, we also want to make sure that there is consistency for protection of conscience rights across the country.
Everything we are dealing with, within this bill providing medically assisted dying to people in this country, is a complete handshake between provincial and federal jurisdictions. If we are willing to put a federal plan in place on the one side in terms of right to die, we have to ensure that we put a federal framework in place on the other side for conscience rights.