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After that, says Hoffman, it may take her another two to three weeks to get those regulations to the cabinet table, to be debated and passed by order-in-council. Assuming C-14, which doesn’t even conform with the Carter rule, fails to get through the Senate before then, we’ll be left in regulatory limbo.

“Alberta Health Services has a system in place to help deal with some of these issues in the interim,” says Hoffman.

That leaves some very tricky issues unresolved.

The draft regulations, we’re told, will honour conscience rights, not just of physicians, nurses and pharmacists, but of publicly funded Catholic health institutions such as Covenant Health. According to those draft regulations, no Catholic hospital, care home, nor palliative care centre will be required to provide medical aid in dying to any patient. Nor will it be required to refer a patient to a doctor or institution that will.

Covenant and its affiliates will only be required to transfer patients who wish to be transferred someplace else — not an easy task, given that some Alberta communities only have Catholic-run hospitals, palliative care beds and nursing homes.

Hoffman says people may have to go home to die. If they need a referral, she suggests, they’ll probably be able to call 811, the toll-free Health Link number, for advice.

Her own grandmother, says the health minister, spent her last years living at Edmonton’s General Hospital, a Catholic facility. She doesn’t think her grandmother would have opted for physician-assisted death, but if she had, Hoffman says, she’d have invited her to die at her house.