Advance directives happen at a provincial or territorial level. They are largely about withholding and withdrawing treatments: People get to make a decision now about what treatment decisions they want made and how they want them made in the future, should they lose decision-making capacity.
It's important to note there are two kinds, instruction and proxy. Instruction is when I say, “These are the decisions I want.” They are written down. I tell you. Proxy is when I say, “I want my sister to make decisions on my behalf.” Nobody advocating advance requests for MAID is suggesting we would have proxy directives. We would only have an instruction. That's the provincial context.
The advance request context is federal. It's dealt with through the Criminal Code. It is only for MAID. It is only a written request developed and signed in the context of a clinician-patient relationship—probably multiple clinicians—over time, as the person is fully informed and as all the eligibility criteria for MAID are checked, such as voluntariness, having the information, and so on.
They cover different health care interventions and they have different rules. They are regulated in different ways, because the federal one would be regulated by the federal government and the provincial ones are done provincially, through colleges and so on.