Mr. Lloyd Riley:

I echo Senator Ruane's thoughts. Sadly, they are not surprising. I do not believe we have made any judgment that people would be better off dead. The whole point of this debate is to give people the ability to make a judgment themselves as to when their lives have become intolerable and when they want to exercise this option as a mechanism of control, alongside a range of other end-of-life options they have available to them. I do not believe anything we have heard today has justified the assertion that a slippery slope, or the different phrase that Professor Binchy prefers, is inevitable. It simply has not happened in the jurisdictions we are looking at. Canada is quite a unique situation. I know the committee had a session last week in which members heard about the supreme court of Canada's ruling. That teaches us that legislatures need to get ahead of this issue. Rather than waiting for the courts to take action, they should draft legislation that aligns with the values of their societies.