Physician-Assisted Dying committee  We do not believe the family should be able to overturn a patient's request if they don't agree, when the patient wants this and is competent. At the same time, we don't believe the family should be able to initiate this for a patient, whether the patient is competent or not. A substitute decision-maker cannot request physician-assisted dying in our opinion.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Regarding the first one you talked about with the will, where you say, “I wouldn't want my life maintained artificially”, sometimes you're not on a ventilator and you don't need resuscitation but unfortunately you linger in that near vegetative state, for want of a better phrase.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Do you mean poverty, homelessness, and things like that?

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I think we should be satisfied, too, that in Oregon, where they track this, the vast majority of patients who ask for physician-assisted dying and get it are the three Ws: white, wealthy, and well-educated. It is not the socially vulnerable who get there. In fact, I think we should wonder whether the poor and undereducated will even know this exists in Canada and that it's an option, and we should be worried about them accessing it.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  We did hear from some stakeholders who said that until every homeless person has a home, they can't make a competent decision to choose between physician-assisted dying and palliative care. Again, we're not going to be able to solve the homelessness problem—and I wish we could—before June.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I think that public evil thing was in there. That was how it was being explained in regard to how a federal law could trump provincial health care law. Again, these are questions better put to someone like Jocelyn Downie, who will be here on Thursday. The federal government can get involved in health care, which seems to be a provincial purview, when it's to correct a potential public evil.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Yes. One statement in our report says that we advocate for moving forward on this at whatever level will achieve consistency across the country and prevent a patchwork. We thought we were talking to the provinces. That was our mandate: provinces and territories. If you think that you can, without encroaching on something purely provincial, come up with something that will achieve that consistency—of course, it would depend on how much it mirrors what we've recommended, and I am speaking personally—then that would be great.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Thank you.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I'm not a legal expert, but I have a feeling that this is going to be seen as something that the provinces will say they have jurisdiction over. That's what we were told by the Attorney General. I will say that I love that you're thinking along those lines, because, again, we don't want a patchwork approach to this.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  My personal opinion is that I don't like “suicide” with this. Yesterday, I think, you were talking about how Health Canada has a campaign to prevent suicide. That is precisely why I don't think suicide belongs in this discussion. I think that's a different issue. As for “euthanasia”, yes, this is technically euthanasia, but we know that has a pejorative connotation.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  We do not, for the purposes being considered for this. Where I think we felt there could be leeway—you've talked about waiting periods, cooling-off periods, and whether patients should require a psychiatric evaluation. We definitely don't feel every patient who asks for this needs to have a psychiatric evaluation, but I would think that where the baseline condition is mental illness—and here we're talking about refractory depression most of the time—most physicians would want that patient to have a psychiatric evaluation.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Yes.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I'll let the bioethicist take that.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Depending on the province you're from.... I'm from Ontario, so I use advance directive. You're going to hear in a couple of days from Jocelyn Downie, who is a health law expert, and we'll defer some of the legalese to her. She felt very strongly that this is not a consistently applied term across the country.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  We don't want you to narrow it. “Irremediable” has already been defined in Carter, because they said the patient does not have to try therapies that are not acceptable to the patient. That's done. For “grievous”, we're saying “very severe or serious”.