I'm going to pick up where my colleague from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association left off.
We think that we are in the basement, because it's either not clear or the government isn't saying what they really mean when they use terms such as “incurable”. In the Carter decision, the court made it quite clear that “irremediable” had to be qualified by “for which there was no treatment acceptable to the person”.
When the government uses the language that a natural death has to be “reasonably foreseeable”, it's either nonsensical, because everyone's death is reasonably foreseeable, or it's unacceptably vague. Doctors who are going to be examining people are going to be asking the same question all of us are, “Why don't they just say 'terminal', because I think that's what they really mean?” If that's the case, then all the people I've listed would not meet the definition in the government's legislation, but would meet that in the Carter decision, because the Carter decision wasn't just about dying; it was about people who were suffering intolerably. I think that's something we have to make clear here: this bill is for people who are imminently dying.