By Kelsi Sheren
Wednesday is June 17.
That’s the day Bill C-14 got Royal Assent in 2016. The day MAID became law in Canada and that is the exact day a joint parliamentary committee is expected to table their report recommending an indefinite pause on expanding assisted dying to people whose only diagnosis is a mental illness.
Someone chose that date.
I came back from Afghanistan with PTSD. A traumatic brain injury. Major Depressive Disorder. Treatment-resistant depression. Hearing loss. I spent years on eleven different medications. None of them worked. I was suicidal for over a decade.
The system told me I would never work again, or be a functional part of society.
Under Canada’s current eligibility criteria, I would qualify for MAID today.
Not because I’m dying. Not because there’s genuinely nothing left to try but because the criteria have been expanded, quietly, legislatively, until the threshold is low enough to catch people like me.
Before we talk policy, here’s what treatment-resistant actually means in this country.
It doesn’t mean nothing works. It means nothing on the approved list has worked. Nothing funded and nothing inside the box the system built.
By the clinical definition, I was treatment-resistant. Eleven drugs. Years of therapy. The official options, exhausted. A MAID assessor could have looked at my file and written “irremediable” and they would have been following the rules.
They would have been wrong.
What saved my life wasn’t on the approved list. Plant medicine. I used psychedelics and integration therapy, CDT with a veteran psychiatrist who never gave up on me, I was fortunate enough to go through Health Canada’s Special Access Program. It’s a regulatory pathway that technically allows doctors to request access to treatments that haven’t been approved yet in Canada for patients with serious conditions when conventional options have failed. It exists because approvals take years and some people can’t wait.
The SAP took months. It was expensive. It was exhausting. My doctor had to navigate paperwork most physicians have never seen. Most people who need it don’t know it exists. Most of the ones who know about it can’t fight through it. Most of the ones who fight through it get denied. This was all for a mushroom!
Track 1 MAID can be approved and administered the same day you apply.
The system that makes it hard to access a treatment that might save your life built a same-day pathway to end it. That’s not a bureaucratic accident. That’s a choice, they are making this choice about people and decided they aren’t worth the research and effort.
The committee heard from 44 witnesses. Received 32 briefs. Sixteen chairs of psychiatry departments across Canada, current and former signed a letter saying
DO NOT DO THIS.
More than 90 disability and mental health organizations said the same.
The problem they all named is the same one I’ve been saying for years. There is no clinical definition of psychiatric irremediability that holds. No test. No threshold. Depression, PTSD, schizophrenia people recover from all of it, sometimes after years, sometimes after decades, when they finally get care that works. You cannot tell someone their suffering is permanently beyond reach and then sign a death certificate based on that guess.
According to sources who spoke to the National Post, the committee is expected to recommend an indefinite pause. Not a permanent no. Not a yes. An indefinite pause.
Committee co-chair Marcus Powlowski said in May it could come back in “three or four or five or twenty years.” Three senators on the 17-member committee are expected to file a dissent.
The Globe and Mail says the government is prepared to table legislation stopping the 2027 expansion if the committee recommends it.
I’ll believe it when I see it signed.
Type 1 diabetes since he was four. Partial blindness in one eye. Depression that his mother Margaret Marsilla said was seasonal it got bad in fall and winter.
He was denied MAID by multiple Ontario doctors. So he went to BC.
On December 29, 2025, he texted his family to say he was dying the next day.
On December 30, he was administered MAID in a Vancouver funeral home.
His parents weren’t notified of the approval. They found out he was dead days later. His death certificate listed a qualifying condition his family says isn’t in his medical records.
He was 26 years old.
Irremediable. Right up until he wasn’t.
The report tables Wednesday. Two days from now. The 10th anniversary of the slow role into one of the largest eugenics programs the world has seen since World War 2. This government the one that has delayed and reconvened and deferred on this file for a decade has to decide what to do with it.
An indefinite pause doesn’t fix the oversight failures. It doesn’t address the doctor-shopping problem Kiano’s case laid bare. It doesn’t fund the mental health system people are trying to access before they give up. It doesn’t make the Special Access Program faster than a death form.
But it’s the first time in ten years the door hasn’t moved forward, and we have a real chance to shut the death industry down.
KELSI
PRE SALE: DO NO HARM? How the Healthcare Industry Legalized Murder. https://a.co/d/0cxrJwru
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