Depending on the province you're from.... I'm from Ontario, so I use advance directive. You're going to hear in a couple of days from Jocelyn Downie, who is a health law expert, and we'll defer some of the legalese to her.
She felt very strongly that this is not a consistently applied term across the country. She believed that we needed to come up with a new way of letting everyone know legally what our wishes would be if we lost competence. She came up with the phrase “patient declaration form”, so we're adopting that.
But if you're more comfortable thinking about this in terms of advance directive, we think, unlike some of your previous guests, that if you've been diagnosed with a grievous and irremediable condition and you're competent at the time of the diagnosis, you should be able to use some kind of advance directive to lay out your wishes in case you lose competence before physician-assisted dying can be administered. I think we go through three scenarios. You can read the report.
There's a fourth scenario where we couldn't reach a consensus. It's trickier. Let's say you're me, healthy, with no diagnosis. I know that under certain conditions I would want a physician-assisted death, but some people on the panel felt that you can't know what your wishes will be before you have the diagnosis. You can't speculate. So we say that the federal government and the provinces should get together and discuss this very serious issue over the next year and come up with some sort of resolution on that.