Justice committee  Section 245 is the offence of administering a noxious substance to a person. In the Carter ruling, the Supreme Court did not identify this offence as being core to the prohibition against physician-assisted suicide. This offence has not been struck down. It is an offence that i

Justice committee  I'd be happy to briefly explain it to the committee. You will recall that in subsection 241.4 (2) is a new offence for destruction of documents related to medical assistance in dying, with a specific mental intent to do a couple of things, either intend to impede someone's acces

Justice committee  Again, I'm passing on information from some of my colleagues who are more expert in these areas. The Minister of Health already has the ability without this amendment to sit down and work with the provinces to establish guidelines on a co-operative basis, and of course, there is

Justice committee  What we're told is that the use of a mandatory type of language is not typical for regulation-making powers. Other concerns with respect to that kind of language relate to what mechanism for enforceability there would be, for instance, if those regulations were not made. Within

Justice committee  It's my understanding that “may” is the standard formulation.

Justice committee  Unfortunately, this is where you hit one of the boundaries of my personal knowledge. When we receive these motions, we do quite a lot of consulting within the department to get the views of the experts. I don't know of any—but I wouldn't, necessarily.

Justice committee  We have a few comments we can make, for the committee's interest. First, it's not entirely clear how equivalency would in effect be assessed in this particular context. For instance, if it were assessed fairly liberally, in Quebec, where it's not required that there be an indepe

Justice committee  I think the idea behind this offence was to give the possibility of a lesser offence being charged in cases in which breach of the safeguards was perhaps not as serious as it might be in other cases. It is true that the amendment would cause the penalty for this offence to match

Justice committee  I'm a little outside my expertise, but the view of the department is that this would be outside Parliament's jurisdiction. The provinces have the competence jurisdictionally to legislate on this, and likely it would be invalid federal law.

Justice committee  There's absolutely nothing in the legislation that requires a physical examination of the patient by the doctors. There is a requirement for a written second opinion, but nothing requires the physical presence of the practitioner with the patient, or the two practitioners to be t

Justice committee  The statement the minister has made, both ministers in fact on a number of occasions, is that nothing in the criminal legislation compels any medical practitioner to do anything. From a strict constitutional or legal point of view, that might really be as far as Parliament can go

Justice committee  I think with respect to the proposed new subsection 4.1, there is something of a danger that a provincial law might be passed that requires conduct that might amount to aiding a medical practitioner. Such a law might be found to be constitutional if it were challenged under the c

Justice committee  I don't think there's any meaningful difference between any of them.

Justice committee  I'm not sure there's any way to cure the conditionality, because in many patients this simply won't be an issue. This is a fact or a safeguard that would apply in some cases, but not in all cases. By it's very nature, I think it's conditional on the facts of the case. It may be e

Justice committee  I can't propose anything novel at this time, but I would draw to the committee's attention that the starting paragraph of proposed subsection 241.2(3) says “Before”, and paragraph (g) says “immediately before”. So in the drafting room we made an effort to distinguish between “bef