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Susan Hughson, a B.C. spokeswoman for Dying with Dignity, said that choice of language could shut out someone who is grievously suffering, but not dying within months. She does not believe Carter, who had a condition called spinal stenosis, would have qualified for assisted death under this legislation because she could have lived for some time with the disease.

While Hughson said she has much respect for the justice minister, and the difficult task of drafting this legislation, she is unhappy that the draft law “does not respect the intent and breadth of Carter in regard to advance consent.”

However, Wilson-Raybould said Saturday that under the proposed legislation, Carter, and Taylor, who had Lou Gehrig’s disease, would likely have been granted access to assisted death.

“Both women were elderly. Both were suffering from the late stages of degenerative diseases and under the Supreme Court ruling it would be the combination of their medical condition, their suffering, and their advanced stage,” she said.

The legislation allows medical practitioners a degree of flexibility in deciding whether an individual patient qualifies, she added.

Whether a patient is facing a “reasonably foreseeable” death will be up to the care providers to decide, Wilson-Raybould said.

But whether that timeline would be three months or three years has not been defined. The minister said “reasonably foreseeable” requires the patient to be on an irreversible trajectory toward death, and that “the patient would be assumed to die in a not too remote time.”