My apologies. I did hear Professor Widger as well, but I'm happy to take a stab at answering some of the questions.
I'll start with the question of capacity. We know that capacity is often formulated as being time- and treatment-specific. A patient could be found capable of making one kind of decision while incapable of making another kind of decision. In the context of some of my research and some of my practice, we have seen mature minors in situations where they are able to make decisions that entailed quite a bit of complexity as far as understanding and appreciation were concerned. There are many factors at play there, whether it be experience of illness, experience of suffering, child development or how their beliefs, values and cultural norms might apply to the decisions where there are elements of subjective value inherent in some of these questions.
We also see that there are usually different weights assigned to decisions. The more grave the decision, usually we see a need for a higher threshold. What some of my work argues is that we actually see situations where mature minors make incredibly weighty decisions that have grave consequences, especially when it comes to a decision to choose to die where there's the option of having a long and lengthy future in some cases. In those situations we regard minors as being capable. In situations where a mature minor is at the end of their life, they are not facing a lengthy future and they're thinking through all their options on how they wish to die. Oftentimes we see those decisions as, I argue, comparatively less weighty.
When it comes to safeguards, I just want to mention that there are many safeguards outlined quite clearly in the Council of Canadian Academies report.