These five terms get used interchangeably all the time, but they’re importantly different. Each one does a specific job, applies at a specific moment, and getting them confused is how people end up with documents that don’t do what they thought they did.
Here’s the clean version.
The quick comparison
| Term | What it does | When it applies | Deals with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Advance care planning (ACP) | The overall process of recording your healthcare wishes and naming a decision-maker | While you’re alive but unable to speak for yourself | Your medical care and values |
| Advance directive / living will | The written document describing the care you would or wouldn’t want | While you’re alive but unable to communicate | Your treatment preferences |
| DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) | A specific medical order about CPR | A medical emergency where your heart or breathing stops | One narrow treatment decision |
| Power of attorney for personal care | Names the person who decides your medical care for you | While you’re alive but unable to decide | Who holds decision-making authority |
| Will | Directs how your property is distributed | After you die | Your money and possessions |
A will is the only one that applies after death. Everything else is about the period when you’re alive but can’t speak for yourself, which a will says nothing about.
Advance care planning is the umbrella
Advance care planning is the whole process, not just a document. It includes thinking through your values, naming a decision-maker, and writing your wishes down. The documents below are the pieces that process produces.
So when someone asks “should I do an advance care plan or a power of attorney?” the answer is usually that the power of attorney is part of the advance care plan. They’re not alternatives.
Advance directive vs. living will
Here’s a piece of good news: in Canada, these two usually mean the same thing.
“Living will” is an older, informal term. The legal term varies by province: Alberta calls it a personal directive, B.C. has the advance directive alongside a representation agreement, Ontario folds your wishes into a power of attorney for personal care and your expressed values. There’s no single national “advance directive” form.
What they share is that all of them are an attempt to write down, in advance, what kind of care you’d want if you couldn’t say so in the moment. The differences are in the legal mechanics from province to province, not the underlying purpose.
Because the terminology is provincial, the practical advice is don’t fixate on the word. Focus on producing the document your province actually recognizes. (Our cross-Canada guide maps which is which.)
DNR: narrower than people think
A Do Not Resuscitate order is not an advance directive. It’s a single medical instruction, usually completed with a physician, that addresses one question: if your heart stops or you stop breathing, should the medical team attempt CPR?
A DNR says nothing about feeding tubes, ventilators, antibiotics, dialysis, or any of the dozens of other decisions that come up in serious illness. People sometimes sign a DNR thinking they’ve handled their advance care planning, when really they’ve answered one question out of many.
A good advance care plan provides the context a DNR sits inside: the values and the decision-maker that explain why that choice, and what you’d want for everything a DNR doesn’t cover.
Power of attorney for personal care: naming, not instructing
This is the document that legally names your decision-maker. The name changes by province (power of attorney for personal care in Ontario, an agent named in a personal directive in Alberta, a representative in B.C.), but the function is the same: it gives a specific person the authority to make medical decisions when you can’t.
The catch: naming someone is not the same as guiding them. A power of attorney for personal care tells the world who decides. It doesn’t tell that person what you’d want. If you name your daughter but never talk to her about your values, she still has to guess.
That’s why naming a decision-maker and recording your wishes go together. One without the other is half a plan.
The will: a different document for a different day
A will distributes your property after death. It has nothing to do with medical care, and it activates only once you’ve died, by which point every medical decision has already been made.
This trips up more people than any other item on the list. “I have a will, so I’m covered” is one of the most common and most costly misunderstandings in this whole area. Your will and your advance care plan protect completely different things, at completely different moments. You need both, and they don’t overlap.
So what do you actually need?
For most people, a complete picture looks like this:
- A will — for your property, after death
- A power of attorney for personal care (whatever your province calls it) — to name your healthcare decision-maker
- An advance directive / recorded wishes — to guide that decision-maker
- A conversation — so the people involved aren’t reading any of this for the first time in a crisis
The first one is a job for an estate lawyer. The other three are advance care planning, and that’s what Tiller is built to help you do, in plain language, formatted to your province’s requirements.
Tiller produces the personal-care and advance-directive documents, formatted to your jurisdiction. We don’t draft wills — that’s your estate lawyer’s job, and the two plans work best side by side.
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