Mr. Speaker, just to pick up on that, I think that is a very important point about the way advance directives operate now and the proposal for an advance directive for MAID. Advance directives now are essentially negative, saying “Do not do this to me”, or “Do not intervene under certain circumstances”. It is necessary that such a framework exists for indicating non-intervention in certain cases.
That is very different from a person saying, “In a certain set of hypothetical circumstances, I want this thing done to me.” There is no other instance in which we create an advance directive for a positive action against a person, nor would we allow advance consent in other such cases. We can think of many cases of lesser gravity than ending a life where we simply do not allow advance consent. We require contemporaneous consent as a necessary condition of autonomy. This is a radical departure from that in what consent means.