Professor Jocelyn Downie:

That is crucial to understand. We started with a court case. We started with the Supreme Court of Canada saying that people with a grievous and irremediable medical condition causing enduring and intolerable suffering must be allowed access to MAID. It cannot be prohibited. It set the parameters. We then had the first piece of legislation from parliament, which narrowed the boundaries and introduced the "natural death has become reasonably foreseeable" criterion. That was challenged in court by plaintiffs with disability. They argued it was discrimination on the basis of disability to deny them access to what people without disability would have access to. The court found that it was in fact discrimination on the basis of disability, as well as a violation of their section 7 rights, so it went back to the Carter boundaries. We then had C7, the next Bill, which shrank it again because it made an exclusion for mental disorders as the sole underlying condition. That is to come out automatically in March 2024, which would take us back to Carter. One has to remember that the Carter boundaries are established by the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms. Our parameters are set by human rights, and by the court's interpretation of what our human rights are, as opposed to the political calculations and analysis of what can get through a parliament. They are set by what the charter of rights demands of us.