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  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  It creates a funny situation. Sometimes “person” in the Criminal Code means both an individual and a corporate entity or other type of organization. In other circumstances, because of the context, it's likely to be restricted to something a human being is actually physically able

Justice committee  Yes. There would be a problem of coherence with the entirety of the Criminal Code with that. We just don't use “individual” unless there's a very specific context in which we're absolutely certain we mean only to catch human beings, as distinct from corporate entities. Otherwis

Justice committee  I can't think of any, off the top of my head, in which we use “individual”.

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  Yes. The offence has not been found to be unconstitutional, but nonetheless, the offence of administering a noxious substance to a person is in law potentially an offence that could be charged, where a physician or nurse practitioner administers a substance to a person within the

Justice committee  Unfortunately, I can only speak very generally to this clause, because the lead for this particular legislation and amendment belongs with another department, and they worked with a different set of drafters, so I was not present in the drafting room. If the committee is looking

Justice committee  That would be my reading as well.

Justice committee  No, this is an amendment to the Corrections and Conditional Release Act.

Justice committee  —an investigation that is otherwise required when an inmate dies in custody. This is an amendment that says the investigation is not required when the person dies as a result of medical assistance in dying.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  I would like our colleagues from Health Canada to comment, but my understanding of why we tend to use “advance requests” relates to the fact that, should it one day be something that Parliament decides to do, it might be outside of the advance directive regimes that the provinces

Justice committee  The first thing I would note is that the location of this clause in 9.1 is such that the text of this clause would not actually go into the Criminal Code. It's a part of the bill, but it's not an amendment to the Criminal Code to insert this into the Criminal Code. In theory, ye

Justice committee  The only thing we could contribute at this point is to say that to stop it from being lawful, medical assistance in dying, would take legislative amendments to the Criminal Code.