Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I suppose the most obvious dimension of it is that physician-assisted dying, providing an individual has gone through all the appropriate steps to demonstrate competence and informed consent and so on, could include advising an individual how to actually accelerate their own deat

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  Well, I would say that voluntary euthanasia is one form of physician-assisted dying.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I would say it's first of all a question of whether it is euthanasia and assisted suicide or one or the other. There are issues around conscience rights and how those should be respected, and the implications of respecting them with regard to access. There are eligibility issues,

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  If it did more than collect statistics—and I think some experts have argued for that—then in effect its reports on what has transpired would lead to recommendations about improving the regime, yes.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  First of all, health, as I think the justice folks said, is an area of concurrent responsibility. The Criminal Code could lay out ground on some issues. I think other issues where one might want to see consistency will be the product of consultation and dialogue between the two l

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I'll underscore one point initially here, which is that there is in general, I think, a desire for consistency. That's one starting point. With regard to the machinery that exists, you mentioned the federal-provincial-territorial ministers of health. They meet annually, and in c

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

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I suppose that over time, that could be the case. As I've indicated, one could argue that if the standard of care and the standard of approach to end-of-life care in the country is the provision of physician-assisted dying and a jurisdiction chose not to put an appropriate regime

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  I guess I'm just noting that there is a long process when it comes to issues related to Canada Health Act principles, as opposed to user fees and extra billing. There's a long process that would ensue before we got to the point of financial penalties—but yes, at the the end of th

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  No, I'm not. I would say that we would regard those as areas of provincial responsibility. I think the issue here is simply whether there's a role for governments collectively to look at those issues, to benefit from each other's intelligence, and to have common approaches.

Physician-Assisted Dying committee  The first thing I would say is that this would only come about, I believe, if there were agreement among provinces and territories and the federal government that this was desirable. Each province and territory—as is the case in other jurisdictions in the United States and intern

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  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