Jamil Jivani

“Mr. Speaker, I think it is important for us to, as my colleague has, drill into the practical aspects of advance directives, not just the theoretical questions around it. Some people who think, in theory, that advance consent makes sense, I think would maybe be chastened by some of these practical realities. A person can get a diagnosis for something that is very frightening and also something that they have not yet experienced. They do not have any lived experience with having that illness, but they know it is coming or they know it is on the way. They are potentially presented with a worst-case scenario. There are many cases of this where people kind of catastrophize what has been presented to them in the process of encouraging them to sign something or accept facilitated death. Hypothetically, based not on someone’s lived experience but fear of the future, they sign a document and their real experience of living with that condition may be very different from that expectation. However, it is others in their life, like doctors or family members, who have to decide whether what a person signed a year ago fits with their present expressed experience. Do these practical realities not raise serious problems for the implementation of something like advance directives?”