OTTAWA—The first result from a committee of senators and MPs tasked with mapping the way forward on physician-assisted suicide is to put Parliament squarely back in the driving seat of the debate.

It’s a place it had been content to relinquish to the Supreme Court until this week.

The second is to put the full range of options on offer to Justin Trudeau’s government in the public opinion spotlight before any of them are entrenched in Liberal legislation.

The third is to signal that the government bill that will result from this process is destined for relatively smooth sailing in both houses of Parliament.

Let’s take them in order.

If the government follows the prescriptions of the majority on the committee, very few Canadians would be barred from seeking medically assisted suicide.

The group — drawn from the ranks of the three main parties — concludes that suffering from a psychiatric disorder should not automatically disqualify a grievously ill person from seeking the help of a physician to commit suicide.

Patients who are handed a dementia diagnosis would — while they are still mentally competent — be able to determine in advance at what stage in their illness they want to go through with medically assisted death.

And while the committee’s prescriptions would initially apply only to those over 18, it wants the government to consider within the space of a few years expanding their application to mature teenagers.

That the federal report sketches out a more permissive regime than the one already in place in Quebec should come as no surprise. The province’s law was drafted prior to the Supreme Court’s 2014 Carter ruling. Some of its restrictions have been overtaken by the findings of the top court.

On Thursday, Quebec Health Minister Gaétan Barrette said the law would be subject to review and, possibly, amended, once a federal framework is in place.

That the committee goes further than the Supreme Court’s prescriptions surprised many observers. But Parliament — as the Conservatives in particular so like to point out — is not merely a stenographer for Canada’s judges.

MPs and senators are not under any obligation to limit the scope of a federal policy on assisted suicide to the letter of the Carter ruling; nor did Parliament actually have to wait for the top court to force its hand to legalize on physician-assisted suicide.

A less timid political class could have taken the initiative some years ago instead of waiting for a handful of brave terminally ill individuals to fight for the right to die at a time of their choosing.

It is to pre-empt the inevitable day when an articulate 16- or 17-year-old goes to court to argue that age alone should not condemn one to additional months or years of excruciating suffering that the committee urges Parliament to keep the door open to expanding access to physician-assisted suicide to mature teenagers

That may be the most controversial recommendation of the report but there are others and the committee should be commended for them. Because they are provocative, its conclusions are more likely to get the full public airing it deserves over the short months still available to Parliament before it meets a court-imposed June 6 deadline for adopting a bill.

The committee cannot be faulted for giving the government a lot of room to manoeuvre as well as opportunity to test all the possible options and sound out the provinces on the choices at hand before drafting a law.

It would not be hard to come up with a more restrictive bill than the committee envisioned and still live up to the top court’s prescriptions.

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But in one form or another, the multi-party majority that backs the recommendations of the committee elevates the adoption of a federal law from probable to virtually certain.

Its work offered the first opportunity to sample the views of parliamentarians since the Carter ruling.

Four Conservative MPs presented a dissenting report. But their colleagues in the Senate stuck with the majority — as did the New Democrats. And that suggests that a consensus will not be anywhere as hard to achieve as might have been expected.