Last week the government of Quebec announced plans to recognize aid in dying as a legal and protected medical practice in the province. They promise a new law by this summer.

A tremendously exciting announcement, it reveals a seismic shift in the thinking of both medical and political leaders. I cannot overstate the magnitude and power of this shift, and fervently hope America’s medical associations and politicians soon follow suit.

Specifically, the government of Quebec intends to regulate aid in dying in spite of the federal crime of assisting a suicide. As in the U.S., federal laws generally supersede provincial ones, and most people assume laws against assisting a suicide prevent doctors from providing life-ending medication to qualified patients who ask.

Canada’s national spokespeople are irate because they, too, hold this assumption. They respond that Quebec cannot change Canada’s criminal code. Even now federal lawyers are defending the assisted-suicide law against a British Columbia judge’s ruling that it’s unconstitutional as applied to aid in dying. They say federal law defines the crime broadly and they must defend it because parliament has repeatedly rejected reform.

But Quebec disagrees, says it intends to proceed and will stand on firm legal ground when it does. The Quebec government is confident it has the authority to adopt law and policy to meet its citizens’ deep desire for more choices at the end of life. How is this possible?

It is possible because aid in dying is different from assisting suicide. It is as different as a surgery is from a stabbing. One is a crime and the other a careful medical practice. Governments outlaw stabbings, but that doesn’t prevent them from regulating surgeries.

Apparently in Canada’s separation of powers, the federal government defines and prosecutes crime, and the provinces oversee healthcare. Quebec health officials have simply adopted the common-sense view that easing the suffering of a dying patient and ensuring a peaceful and pain-free death is a medical matter, not a criminal one. And as such, it falls under the jurisdiction of the province to regulate the practice of medicine.

For well over a decade Compassion & Choices has argued vigorously for a change from the language of “suicide.” We urge that “Language Matters,” as we call on academics, public officials, journalists and headline writers to employ neutral, accurate words to refer to assisted death. Oregon’s experience informs much of the national dialogue, yet commentators notoriously deploy inflammatory suicide language in what should be neutral public forums. Assisting a suicide is a felony in Oregon; to call medical procedures under Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act “assisted suicide” falsely labels them a crime.

Assisting a suicide – to maliciously goad a mentally ill person to act on his self-destructive impulses – should be understood as a crime. Aid in dying – to mercifully respond to a rational dying person’s request to abbreviate his suffering –should be understood as medical practice. Repeatedly, anti-choice forces have won political contests by blurring this stark and monumental distinction. That tactic just lost its mojo in Quebec.

Here, finally, officials are no longer blind to the distinction between assisted suicide and aid in dying, and they embrace its concrete legal consequences. Here at last comes validation that we have not been merely picking at semantics. Different words evoke different circumstances and different conduct.

Don’t think the blinders fell suddenly. Exhaustive study and deliberation by prominent entities gradually, carefully, broadened the perspectives and changed the formal position of government.

Doctors took the first step. In 2006 the provincial medical association, the Collège des Médecins du Québec, embarked on three years of study in which it examined modern medicine and society, polled its members, and reflected on the results. The Collège’s refreshing and authoritative discussion paper, Physicians, Appropriate Care and the Debate on Euthanasia – A Reflection, came out in October 2009 and launched the serious dialogue now bearing fruit.

Quebec’s National Assembly responded by appointing an all-party select committee that held hearings and deliberated for two years. Last March it published a beautiful report of findings and          recommendations. Its 178 pages are available in English and well worth the read.

Finally, the government appointed three expert lawyers to a judicial panel to make policy recommendations and propose steps to implementation. It is this report that lays out the legal rationale and explains how the Assembly and the Ministry of Health are to proceed. For French readers, the 400-page document is available here.

The lesson here is that lawyers and politicians go where doctors lead them. They want doctors to decide what constitutes ethical practice for the 21st century. Tradition-bound medical societies of the United States (notably the AMA) guard their historic dominance in the doctor/patient relationship and refuse to acknowledge changing public expectations. They resist measures that entrust to patients crucial decisions about their own lives and deaths. They have used and continue to use their enormous political power and vast treasure to obstruct sane policy on aid in dying.

Other, more progressive medical societies (notably the American Medical Women’s Association and the American Public Health Association) have embraced change and support both the use of accurate language and the option of aid in dying.

With this enlightened example to our north, perhaps American medicine cannot continue its obstructionism much longer.