Health committee  Since you posed your question both to the advisory committee and to Health Canada, I think there's a connection with the concept of having a gathering point for virtually every interest--governmental, non-governmental, professional, public, and so on--to have a huge conversation

Health committee  Could I just add one point to this particular conversation? It is the case as well that there are a not insignificant number of vacant residency seats each year. They tend to be more in family medicine than in subspecialties, and there tend to be more in some provinces than oth

Health committee  I think it's in the range of just under 400 Canadian IMGs who....

Health committee  I wish I could explain it in more detail. I have to be quite candid; I'm not an expert on the CaRMS system. Perhaps Dr. Tepper could talk a bit about it. I simply referenced it with respect to the fact that when the system plays out, at the end of the day there are unoccupied sea

Health committee  Before I ask Dr. Tepper to speak about this, I would just note that the residency matching service principally involves the universities, the matching service organization, and the provincial and territorial jurisdictions. This is not something over which any one party has comple

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Thank you very much. Good morning, all, and thank you for the opportunity to be here today to discuss this important issue. Last week, my colleagues at the Department of Justice provided a summary of the Carter ruling and an overview of the core issues, particularly as they rel

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Thank you for the question. Are you asking for the distinction as to how these are defined in each of the two languages, or are you simply asking for the distinction between euthanasia and assisted suicide?

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I guess the first thing I would say is that our general understanding—I know that colleagues from the Department of Justice spoke in some detail about this the other day—is that we would regard the Supreme Court decision as having addressed both euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Well, I think it's relatively straightforward. Up to this point, in respect of a federal-provincial-territorial working group that's been established to assist with collaboration between the two officials in the health and justice sectors in the two orders of government, Quebec h

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I'm not sure, frankly, that I can actually speak to that. I'm not aware of that issue, and I would not say, just based on a reading of the Quebec act or the commentary in either the provincial-territorial or the federal panel report, that it has been identified as a concern. I do

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I think so.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Thank you. The first thing I would say, just to reiterate the comments I made in my remarks, is that there is no question that discussions following the Supreme Court's decision in Carter have really shone quite a bright light on the area of palliative care, but well before that

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I'm not in a position to document a lot of past activity in this area, because it hasn't happened, but I think that for the future this is absolutely an area that will be part of this agenda connected to the health accord.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I doubt that we would arrive at a situation in which we would dictate specifically, as a condition of federal funding, what forms of care are required to be provided by any individual or by provinces and territories collectively. Medical necessity, generally speaking, although it

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Let me just say that the last line of defence is the withholding of funds. There would be interaction with that jurisdiction and a lot of conversation long before the point of withholding funds. Without getting into a lot of detail on the Canada Health Act, normally funds are wi