Senator Wallin: From most of the things that I have studied in other countries, my understanding is they have a very different view of it. It’s a decision that you make, and that’s it.

In countries like Switzerland, they’ve even allowed for — I hate to use the phrase — medical tourism, where people can go and seek an end to their life if they’re suffering and, for some reason, do not qualify in this country.

Ours is complicated. There’s no question. But I think that’s a good thing. What we are doing is really dealing with the nitty‑gritty of this. This is not a decision that anybody takes lightly. It’s not anything that a medical practitioner wants to take lightly.

Because ours is still in the Criminal Code, it makes it doubly more complicated because we’re asking people to engage as individuals or as medical practitioners in something that we’re still saying might be against the law. It’s really important that we narrow this down.

This comes home with the benefit, as I mentioned several times, of “Audrey’s Amendment” because it moved us in that direction, which is that this woman knew that she would lose her ability to give that final consent in the final moments because of the nature of her illness and so she took her own life early.

Honestly, I get calls from people every week documenting cases of friends who have made that choice because they didn’t quite qualify. They were afraid that if they waited for the moment when they would qualify, they wouldn’t be able to consent. We have that Catch-22 there for a lot of people.

We owe it to everybody to find clarity. Because we’ve come this far and because we are doing this in such a deliberate way, we don’t have a lot of international precedent. Our own provinces are wrestling with it. Quebec is doing some of the heavy lifting on this. It seems we always wait until there’s a court decision. We’re forced in one direction and then we run around and try to figure it out.

What I think we need to be doing — and this is what the committee and other groups are involved in — is to be proactive. We need to try to lay out the parameters, to give people assurance, peace of mind and confidence that we’re not doing this without serious understanding and study and putting the rules, protections and safeguards in place. That’s really what we have to do. We need to do that here, in the other place and in the courts. The medical providers have to engage in that, and they are, but we need to find some way to bring it all together. I’m hoping this will be a starting point for that discussion.