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| Alicia Duncan |
Below is the speech by Alicia Duncan at the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition Press Conference at the Parliamentary Press Gallery on December 5, 2025 along with the full video of the event.
A single moment changed the course of her life. A concussion in February 2020 marked the beginning of her mental and physical decline. Over the next twenty months, her symptoms worsened. She became anxious, depressed, and paranoid, turning to the medical system for answers. But test after test revealed nothing. Her weight was dropping drastically with no clear explanation—and with it, her hope of recovery.
When she brought her MAiD request to her longtime physician, he refused to assess her, believing she wasn’t engaging with treatment. But under the law, he was required to refer her to someone who would.
We would later learn from her medical records that she was consuming roughly 800 calories a day—so frail that the two clinicians who assessed her, nurse practitioner Shawn Young and Dr. Grace Park under the Fraser Health Authority, interpreted this as a “reasonably foreseeable” death. Her MAiD procedure was scheduled for two days later.
But my sister and I saw what the assessors did not, and in a last-ditch attempt to save her life, we provided evidence to a provincial court judge—who halted her MAiD appointment to allow for a psychiatric assessment.
When our mom learned her death had been postponed, she attempted to end her own life and was placed on a temporary involuntary hold in the very psychiatric unit she once managed. She had spent her career as a psychiatric nurse, caring for people in crisis. But when she needed care, psychiatrists deemed her capable—despite every indicator of the opposite—and released her, knowing she was returning home to pursue MAiD. Four hours later, my sister and I received texts from her common-law partner: she was gone.
There was no chance for a final conversation. We said goodbye to her frozen body in a crematorium, the IV used to inject the MAiD drugs still in her arm—inches above the incision from her suicide attempt days earlier. That image became the source of flashbacks, later diagnosed as post traumatic stress disorder.
In the weeks that followed, we searched for answers. What we found was a system with no mechanism for accountability. Her records were contradictory. Another recent overdose attempt had never been disclosed. Self-diagnosed conditions were written as clinical fact.
When we brought this evidence to the police, they opened an unprecedented investigation in Canada’s MAiD history. But Fraser Health refused to release the MAiD assessment records, even to investigators. The Privacy Commissioner upheld that refusal. The only person legally entitled to request the documents that might reveal whether her assisted suicide was lawful was my mother. And she was dead.
Her death compelled our family into advocacy. It has carried her story to the federal committee reviewing Canada’s assisted-suicide laws in 2022, where policymakers confronted the ethical terrain her case laid bare. And earlier this year, it carried that story into parliamentary rooms across the United Kingdom, where lawmakers are studying Canada as a test case as they consider legalizing assisted suicide there. What our family lived through stands as evidence of a law expanding faster than the safeguards meant to keep people safe.
Four years later, we still do not know whether the law was followed. Not because the truth is complicated, but because the system is designed to prevent families—and even police—from finding out.
Her case showed there is no requirement for a practitioner to verify a diagnosis for a MAiD assessment. No burden of proof. No consequence when errors end a life. No access to records. No appeal. There is no meaningful oversight.
And now, in fifteen months, Canada is scheduled to expand assisted suicide to those whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness. Yet leading experts warn: mental illness cannot be declared irremediable. There is no test, no scan, no metric that can say a person’s recovery is impossible.
Autonomy—the word we hear so often—does not survive in a system where the alternatives are untreated suffering, homelessness, poverty, extensive waitlists for specialists, emergency room closures, or disability payments that do not cover rent. Autonomy collapses when people are forced to choose between pain and death because care simply does not exist.
But consider this: if restricting MAiD is viewed as a violation of human rights, then denying Canadians timely access to care must also be understood as a violation of their human rights.
My mother’s life—and her death—reveals something we can no longer ignore: a country that cannot reliably provide care cannot responsibly provide death as its substitute.
In the coming months, MPs will vote on Bill C-218. If passed, its impact will be profound: it will permanently halt the upcoming MAiD expansion, sending a message that people living with mental illness deserve a meaningful standard of care.
To Canadians listening: your voice matters. Call your MP. Visit their office. Tell them what this issue means to you. Because if someone you love is ever in a moment of crisis and approved for MAiD—with no legal recourse to protect them—this moment may come back to you with a question you cannot undo: what if I had spoken up?
And to Members of Parliament: you are not casting a vote on ideology. You are casting a vote on whether mental illness is met with treatment and dignity—or with a state-sanctioned death…and whether stories like my mother’s become rarer, or more common.
History will not remember the talking points or the politics of this moment. It will remember the lives saved or lost because of the choice you made. If Canada is going to defend the right to die with dignity, then we must first defend the right to live with dignity.
Thank you.
Good morning. My name is Alicia Duncan, and I am here today as the daughter of Donna Duncan—who died through Canada’s medical assistance in dying regime, becoming the first MAiD death in history to trigger a police investigation.
A single moment changed the course of her life. A concussion in February 2020 marked the beginning of her mental and physical decline. Over the next twenty months, her symptoms worsened. She became anxious, depressed, and paranoid, turning to the medical system for answers. But test after test revealed nothing. Her weight was dropping drastically with no clear explanation—and with it, her hope of recovery.
When she brought her MAiD request to her longtime physician, he refused to assess her, believing she wasn’t engaging with treatment. But under the law, he was required to refer her to someone who would.
We would later learn from her medical records that she was consuming roughly 800 calories a day—so frail that the two clinicians who assessed her, nurse practitioner Shawn Young and Dr. Grace Park under the Fraser Health Authority, interpreted this as a “reasonably foreseeable” death. Her MAiD procedure was scheduled for two days later.
But my sister and I saw what the assessors did not, and in a last-ditch attempt to save her life, we provided evidence to a provincial court judge—who halted her MAiD appointment to allow for a psychiatric assessment.
When our mom learned her death had been postponed, she attempted to end her own life and was placed on a temporary involuntary hold in the very psychiatric unit she once managed. She had spent her career as a psychiatric nurse, caring for people in crisis. But when she needed care, psychiatrists deemed her capable—despite every indicator of the opposite—and released her, knowing she was returning home to pursue MAiD. Four hours later, my sister and I received texts from her common-law partner: she was gone.
There was no chance for a final conversation. We said goodbye to her frozen body in a crematorium, the IV used to inject the MAiD drugs still in her arm—inches above the incision from her suicide attempt days earlier. That image became the source of flashbacks, later diagnosed as post traumatic stress disorder.
In the weeks that followed, we searched for answers. What we found was a system with no mechanism for accountability. Her records were contradictory. Another recent overdose attempt had never been disclosed. Self-diagnosed conditions were written as clinical fact.
When we brought this evidence to the police, they opened an unprecedented investigation in Canada’s MAiD history. But Fraser Health refused to release the MAiD assessment records, even to investigators. The Privacy Commissioner upheld that refusal. The only person legally entitled to request the documents that might reveal whether her assisted suicide was lawful was my mother. And she was dead.
Her death compelled our family into advocacy. It has carried her story to the federal committee reviewing Canada’s assisted-suicide laws in 2022, where policymakers confronted the ethical terrain her case laid bare. And earlier this year, it carried that story into parliamentary rooms across the United Kingdom, where lawmakers are studying Canada as a test case as they consider legalizing assisted suicide there. What our family lived through stands as evidence of a law expanding faster than the safeguards meant to keep people safe.
Four years later, we still do not know whether the law was followed. Not because the truth is complicated, but because the system is designed to prevent families—and even police—from finding out.
Her case showed there is no requirement for a practitioner to verify a diagnosis for a MAiD assessment. No burden of proof. No consequence when errors end a life. No access to records. No appeal. There is no meaningful oversight.
And now, in fifteen months, Canada is scheduled to expand assisted suicide to those whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness. Yet leading experts warn: mental illness cannot be declared irremediable. There is no test, no scan, no metric that can say a person’s recovery is impossible.
Autonomy—the word we hear so often—does not survive in a system where the alternatives are untreated suffering, homelessness, poverty, extensive waitlists for specialists, emergency room closures, or disability payments that do not cover rent. Autonomy collapses when people are forced to choose between pain and death because care simply does not exist.
But consider this: if restricting MAiD is viewed as a violation of human rights, then denying Canadians timely access to care must also be understood as a violation of their human rights.
My mother’s life—and her death—reveals something we can no longer ignore: a country that cannot reliably provide care cannot responsibly provide death as its substitute.
In the coming months, MPs will vote on Bill C-218. If passed, its impact will be profound: it will permanently halt the upcoming MAiD expansion, sending a message that people living with mental illness deserve a meaningful standard of care.
To Canadians listening: your voice matters. Call your MP. Visit their office. Tell them what this issue means to you. Because if someone you love is ever in a moment of crisis and approved for MAiD—with no legal recourse to protect them—this moment may come back to you with a question you cannot undo: what if I had spoken up?
And to Members of Parliament: you are not casting a vote on ideology. You are casting a vote on whether mental illness is met with treatment and dignity—or with a state-sanctioned death…and whether stories like my mother’s become rarer, or more common.
History will not remember the talking points or the politics of this moment. It will remember the lives saved or lost because of the choice you made. If Canada is going to defend the right to die with dignity, then we must first defend the right to live with dignity.
Thank you.
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