Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I'll try to answer your question.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  If you look historically at the situations in which life could be taken, and I'm talking here about civilized societies and societies we would equate ourselves with in Canada, they were all situations where it was thought necessary to take life to save human life. Indeed, it's ac

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Yes.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  That brings up the very difficult and contested issue of what human dignity is. What has happened, both in the literature and in the courts, is that the exercise of autonomy has been equated with human dignity, so that if you lose your ability to be autonomous—which by definiti

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  To answer that, the Supreme Court makes clear that it's putting conditions on the availability of physician-assisted death, so it's a matter of what those conditions are. What I'm recommending is that it should be a last resort and very rarely used, if you don't want to normalize

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  If you look at the Supreme Court of Canada cases, the two leading ones in which the original doctrine was established—Reibl v. Hughes and Hopp v. Lepp—what they require is that all reasonably indicated treatments for the patient for the condition they have must be disclosed to th

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Thank you for your invitation to appear before this committee. I'd like to put on the record, as you might already know, that I believe that euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide—what the Supreme Court calls physician-assisted death or dying—are inherently wrong and should re