Advance directives enable individuals to project their healthcare preferences into a period of anticipated incapacity. With advance directives, individuals can designate whom they would like to have make healthcare decisions for them (proxy directives), or give their healthcare provider advice on what to do (instructional directives), or both. Canada has an unusually wide variety of legislative approaches to advance directives. In what follows we describe and evaluate these, with the aim of pointing the way toward the ideally best legislation and policies on such directives.