Family files euthanasia (MAiD) complaint to the Chief Coroner of Ontario.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Brigitte with her grand daughter.

On July 22, 2026 I contacted Brigitte Stegemann's family and received permission to republish the facebook posting concerning the death of Brigitte.

Kelsi Sheren has confirmed that Brigitte was killed by euthanasia (MAiD) based on questionable competency and consent by Dr Catherine Louise Koester.

There were several issues that should be considered infractions of Canada's euthanasia (MAiD) law.

Sheren reported on August 17 that family has filed a complaint to the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario in the death of their grand-mother.

Sheren outlined the complaint to the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario:

Brigitte — GG’s granddaughter, namesake, twelve-year caregiver, Power of Attorney for personal care — has formally requested an investigation by the MAiD Death Review Team into the death of July 10 at The Pearl in Cannifton, Ontario, licensed to Pearl Care Homes Inc. and formerly E.J. McQuigge Lodge.

These are their reasons, below, along with the original email.

Capacity. Documented cognitive disorientation during the assessment, in which GG could not recall basic facts about her own family. You read what that looked like: the second-youngest of fourteen children telling the assessing physician she had no siblings, then breaking down in confusion, while her family corrected the majority of her answers out loud.

The Power of Attorney, bypassed. Staff initiated private MAiD discussions and completed and witnessed the application paperwork in secret, while the advocate was out of the country for ten days.

No final express consent. The procedure went ahead on the morning of July 10 while GG stayed completely silent and never gave the verbal confirmation the family had been promised, strictly and repeatedly, would be required.

They are asking the Chief Coroner to examine the attending clinician’s compliance, and the conduct of the home’s staff, under the Coroners Act and the Criminal Code.

Kelsi Sheren further explains what the complaint concerns:

Now put the three allegations against that MAID narrative. A capacity finding on a woman who couldn’t name her siblings. Paperwork the home’s manager filled out herself. A death that proceeded through silence.

The death certificate and its stated cause. Both eligibility assessments the law requires, and the identity of whoever performed the second one. The signed request, its date, its witness. The full medication administration record and any waiver of final consent, which remains the whole case: either the procedure went ahead without the express consent the law demands, or a waiver exists that nobody mentioned to the family, including while assuring them of the safeguard it would have cancelled.

This case will determine if Ontario's death system has any oversight. Sheren states:

The granddaughter asked the home for the records. She was refused, repeatedly.

GG told the people offering her death that her faith said no. Nine weeks later she had an appointment. When the last safeguard came she met it with silence, and the family who’d been promised silence would stop it watched it not stop.

Her granddaughter has now done every single thing this system asks of a family that believes something went wrong. Kept the records. Built the timeline. Filed with the coroner. Named the doctor.

What happens next isn’t a test of this family. It’s a test of whether Canadian oversight of assisted death can do anything at all when someone walks in with a timeline, a Power of Attorney, and a name.

Kelsi Sheren contacted Dr Catherine Louise Koester and The Pearl for their response and has received no response. 

If your family has experienced a MAiD death you believe was non-compliant or coerced, in Canada or elsewhere, contact me confidentially at coaching@kelsisheren.com. Anonymity is guaranteed unless you choose otherwise, and nothing you share is published without your consent.

Links to the articles on the death of Brigitte (GG) Stegemann

• The family filed. Here's the name. Dr. Kate Koester (Link).
• The last ten days of Brigitte "GG" Stegemann (Link).
• Our Families Experience with Medical Assistance in Dying (Link).

The Last Ten Days of Brigittte (GG) Stegemann

This article was published by Kelsi Sheren on substack on July 27, 2026.

By Kelsi Sheren

An 83 year old Ontario woman declined medical assistance in dying, telling her family it conflicted with her Christian faith. Two months later with discussions restarted behind her advocate’s back, her capacity assessed in a meeting her family calls a farce, and her paperwork completed and witnessed by the facility’s own staff after her death was already scheduled she died by lethal injection without, her family says, speaking a word of final consent. A reconstruction.

*This account is based on the Stegemann family’s written public statement, published to Facebook in mid July 2026, which has drawn hundreds of thousands of interactions and constitutes the first public record of this case; on an 80 minute recorded interview I conducted on July 22, 2026, with Brigitte, GG’s granddaughter, namesake, caregiver of more than twelve years, and holder of her Power of Attorney; and on the provisions of Canada’s Criminal Code governing medical assistance in dying. The family has formally requested the underlying documents the death certificate, the eligibility assessments, the signed request and the identity of its witness, the medication administration records, and any waiver of final consent and none had been produced at the time of writing. Where the family’s two accounts differ on a detail, this report says so or follows their written statement. The practitioners involved are not named here, as the family chose not to name them publicly; they will be identified when records confirm their identities, and each will be given the opportunity to respond before that happens.*

On the morning of Friday, July 10, 2026, on the patio of a long term care facility “The Pearl, formally EJ Mcquigge Lodge” in Belleville, Ontario, an 83 year old woman named Brigitte Stegemann “GG” to the four generations of family who loved her sat in the fresh air in a wheelchair, eating a scoop of strawberry ice cream, her favourite, surrounded by her daughter and her granddaughter while they waited for her pastor to arrive. Her death by lethal injection, under Canada’s medical assistance in dying program, was scheduled for eleven o’clock.

Within ten minutes of the family settling outside, by their account, an administrator came out to the patio and insisted that GG be returned to her room immediately so that an intravenous line could be started nearly two hours ahead of the scheduled procedure, for reasons no one at the facility ever explained. Her granddaughter refused to cut the morning short, answered the administrator’s question of how much longer the family needed with “as long as it takes,” and finally had to ask her to leave the patio so the family could have privacy.

By early afternoon GG was dead. According to her family, who were in the room, she spent her final minutes silent, her hands clasped in a fixed prayer position, and never gave the explicit verbal confirmation that the medical team had assured them strictly and repeatedly, they say she would be required to provide before anything was administered. When she said nothing, her granddaughter smiled, flooded with relief, believing the silence meant the procedure could not lawfully proceed.

It proceeded.

Whether that was legal turns substantially on documents the family has demanded and not yet received. Whether it should ever have reached that morning is the larger question because the story of GG’s last ten days, as her family has now told it publicly and in detail to me, is a story about what happens to a hard of hearing, cognitively vulnerable woman who says no to the system offering her death, once her advocate leaves the country for ten days. More than a decade of advocacy, Brigitte Stegemann was, by her family’s written account, the second youngest of fourteen children, a devout Christian, and the mother of two Fritz and Karin. She had lived at the facility for two years. She was completely deaf in her left ear and had very limited hearing in her right; conversation required repetition and volume, and even then she often looked past visitors rather than engaging. The one voice that reliably reached her, family and staff alike had long observed, belonged to her granddaughter and namesake, Brigitte, who could be heard at a normal speaking tone even through a mask.

That granddaughter had devoted more than twelve years to GG’s care. She held legal Power of Attorney and served as the primary contact for all medical and personal decisions, and the facility used her in that role constantly calling every day or every other day, the family says, about medications, treatments, appointments, and the small logistics of daily living. That pattern of communication is worth fixing in mind, because the family’s central allegation is defined by the moment it stopped.

There is one more thing the family says about GG that no institution ever formally recorded: she had lived her whole life, in their observation, with an undiagnosed developmental or cognitive impairment one they suspected may have been on the autism spectrum that deeply affected her processing, comprehension, and decision making. It had never been clinically assessed. It will matter shortly.

Roughly five months before her death, GG was diagnosed with untreatable stage four stomach cancer and roughly two months before her death, a meeting was held at the facility to discuss the possibility of medical assistance in dying. The family’s written account of GG’s response is unambiguous: she clearly stated that she did not wish to pursue it, and explicitly said that it conflicted with her personal beliefs and her Christian faith.

She said no. What follows is what happened anyway.

Ten days

Shortly after that refusal, Brigitte and her husband, Robert, left on a planned ten day vacation. GG was not left alone, her daughter Karin and Karin’s husband, Dave, visited regularly throughout.

What they found on those visits alarmed them. GG was extremely weak and largely unresponsive waking briefly, sometimes only long enough to say her daughter’s name, then drifting off; eyes open but unfocused. Dave told the family that, based on what he was seeing, he believed GG was nearing the natural end of her life regardless of any medical intervention.

Meanwhile, the phone calls to Brigitte continued as they always had routine decisions, routine consultations, the familiar rhythm of a facility that contacted her about everything. What the facility did not tell her, on any of those calls, was that its staff were meeting privately with her grandmother twice, by a nurse’s later admission in front of the family to discuss the assisted death GG had declined two months earlier. Brigitte learned only that a further formal meeting about MAiD had been scheduled for after her return.

The family’s written statement calls this omission the first major warning sign, and it is difficult to argue with their framing: an institution that phoned the Power of Attorney about routine care matters found no occasion, in ten days of contact, to mention that it had reopened the question of her grandmother’s death behind her back.

The Monday turnaround, and a medication record that couldn’t explain it.

On Monday, July 6, the family attended the scheduled MAiD meeting expecting to speak with GG’s physician. What they encountered first was GG herself and she was, abruptly, a different woman. The grandmother who days earlier had been too weak to hold a conversation was sitting upright in bed, talking, smiling, laughing when Dave playfully pinched her toes and raising her fists as if to box with him.

The turnaround was so dramatic, and so inexplicable against what Karin and Dave had witnessed all week, that Brigitte grew suspicious enough to request GG’s Medication Administration Record that Wednesday and audit it herself. What she found deepened the problem rather than resolving it: the facility’s official records showed the exact same dosage administered every single day.

The family’s written statement lays out the dilemma that record creates, and I will state it as plainly as they did, because it is the analytical heart of this case. Either the facility’s paperwork did not accurately reflect what was actually being administered to GG or the records are accurate, her days of unresponsiveness and her Monday alertness occurred on identical medication, and the clinical team then chose that brief, anomalous window of lucidity to rush through a permanent capacity evaluation that bore no resemblance to her true everyday baseline. There is no third reading that flatters the institution. The original alleged MAR log, which the family has demanded, will determine which of the two it is.

The physician never arrived that Monday. While the family waited, an administrator and a registered nurse entered GG’s room and it was there, in GG’s presence, that the confrontation the family describes as a wall of defensiveness took place. Brigitte asked who had arranged the MAiD meeting; no clear answer was given. The nurse disclosed that staff had met privately with GG twice during the vacation. Brigitte asked, point blank, whether those conversations had been initiated by GG or by facility staff, and why they had been initiated at all given GG’s faith based refusal. The nurse an employee Brigitte, a near daily presence for years, had never once encountered grew agitated, and answered: “I’m advocating for her.” Pressed on who had raised the subject, she snapped: “I don’t need to tell you anything.” When Brigitte finally said, “I don’t understand where this attitude is coming from,” the nurse retorted, “Well, you have attitude,” and, after being told to leave and return only when composed, scoffed and stormed out the entire exchange unfolding where a frightened, dying woman could watch it.

Two details complete that scene. First, the family later learned from the home’s own manager that the nurse was barred from GG’s room immediately after the altercation which is to say, the administration itself judged her conduct indefensible, in the same week it relied on the process she had helped set in motion. Second, before the meeting dissolved, the administrator suggested that, “worst case,” she could sit in on the physician’s private meeting with GG. Brigitte refused: either the meeting was strictly doctor and patient, or Brigitte would be present too. Her stated fear, which the coming days would do nothing to quiet, was of her grandmother alone in a room, outnumbered by authority figures, feeling she had no choice but to agree to their terms.

Ninety minutes past the appointment time, the family was told the physician could not attend, and everything moved to Tuesday.

Six questions.

On Tuesday, July 7, the attending physician the family identifies her publicly only as Dr. K arrived to determine whether GG had the capacity to make an informed decision about MAiD, and began putting questions to her in the family’s presence.

What followed, in the words of the family’s written statement, was a deeply alarming farce. GG’s deafness forced Dr. K to repeat her questions several times, but the barrier ran far deeper than hearing. Asked whether she had any siblings, the second youngest of fourteen children answered that she had none. The family corrected the record. Asked whether any siblings were still alive, GG said no; the family intervened again some were living, and GG had spoken with one just the previous week. By this point GG was disoriented and distressed, crying, saying “I forgot about the grandkids” as she confused her living siblings with her great grandchildren. The family, by their account, had to correct the vast majority of the answers she gave.

Brigitte objected to the evaluation on the spot, asking Dr. K directly how a woman who could not accurately recount the most basic facts of her own family and who was actively breaking down in confusion in front of her could possibly be deemed capable of consenting to her own death.

The assessment carried forward anyway. Dr. K then explained the procedure to GG in terms the family recounts as: receiving medication, feeling peace, falling asleep with the explicit promise that she “would not lose control of her bowels.” The family’s written statement dwells on this framing, and rightly so. To a woman of GG’s generation, faith, and cognitive capacity, “medication” meant healing, care, relief; describing a lethal injection as medicine while soothing her specific, everyday fears of physical indignity did not inform her consent so much as engineer it. What the gentle framing omitted among other things is that the MAiD protocol includes a paralytic.

Then Dr. K instructed the family to leave the room. Brigitte asked to remain, citing more than a decade as GG’s advocate and her legal Power of Attorney. The request was flatly denied. The critical conversation occurred entirely in private, and when Dr. K emerged, she announced: “I have deemed her capable of making her own decisions.” GG, she said, had consented, and the procedure was scheduled for Friday, July 10.

The private meeting had been justified as necessary to rule out pressure or influence from the family. Brigitte answered that reasoning with the question this entire case keeps asking “Well, we are concerned about pressure and influence from the home. Would that not be a concern of yours as well?” Dr. K brushed it off if that was the family’s concern, they could take it up with the home. Why influence from the institution that had reopened MAiD with a woman who refused it, met with her privately while her advocate was away, and controlled her bed was not an automatic clinical concern while her family of decades was treated as the presumptive threat is a question the physician, by the family’s account, never engaged at all.

The legal effect of those few private minutes was total. Under the MAiD framework, a patient deemed capable in the moment speaks for herself; the finding instantly superseded GG’s Power of Attorney and stripped her designated advocate of standing. A determination the family regards as indefensible on its face rendered in an evaluation they measure in minutes, on a woman whose answers they had spent the morning correcting was, from that moment, the only voice the system recognized.

The paperwork came after, then there is the sequence the family’s statement calls the backwards timeline, and it may be the most legally consequential paragraph in their account.

A MAiD death is supposed to rest on a formal written request, signed by the patient and independently witnessed, with assessments and scheduling built on top of it. In GG’s case, by the family’s account, the death was scheduled on Tuesday, July 7 and it was only after that date was set that facility staff completed the official MAiD application and witnessed GG’s signature, privately, without informing the family, during a week in which Brigitte and Robert were at the facility visiting every single day. The family learned of it only because Brigitte asked. On Wednesday, in a conversation with the home’s manager, she inquired about the paperwork she assumed she would be involved in, and the manager admitted that she had personally filled out GG’s official MAiD application herself.

Consider what that means, if the records bear it out. The facility initiated the renewed MAiD discussions with a patient who had declined. The facility’s staff conducted the private meetings while the advocate was away. The facility’s manager completed the application. The facility’s personnel witnessed the signature. And the facility’s records will now be asked to explain a medication log that either misstates what GG was given or confirms that her capacity was assessed inside an unexplained anomaly. At every load bearing point where the law imagines independence, the same institution appears initiator, facilitator, scribe, and witness while the one genuinely independent party, a Power of Attorney of twelve years, was kept, in the family’s phrase, in the dark despite their constant physical presence at the home.

Canadian law, it should be said, permits more of this than most readers will assume. The 2021 amendments to the Criminal Code reduced the witnessing requirement from two independent witnesses to one and expressly allowed paid professional care providers to serve. An employee of the institution that controls the bed may lawfully witness the request that empties it. Whether every element of this particular sequence was lawful is a question for the documents. That the law was written to make most of it possible is not in dispute and is its own indictment.

“They’re going to kill me Friday?”

On Wednesday, July 8, before the family’s planned visit, the facility called Brigitte with news: the procedure was being moved up a full day, to Thursday, July 9, because the physician had an opening in her schedule. Staff had already gone directly to GG, the caller said, and GG had agreed.

Brigitte objected immediately and drove in. In a meeting with the home manager, she laid out the family’s position staff had gone around the advocate again, this time to change the date of a woman’s death for a doctor’s calendar, while the things GG had actually and consistently said mattered to her being surrounded by her family, having her pastor present were treated as secondary to scheduling. The program, Brigitte told the manager plainly, was being rammed down the family’s throats. The manager apologized for how things had been handled and asked what she could do to make the situation better. Brigitte’s answer, as the family recorded it: “The damage is already done, and you have taken an awful situation and made it even worse.”

The family’s opposition worked, to the extent anything did that week: the facility backed down, and Friday at 11:00 a.m. was maintained.

It was during the visit that followed that the conversation at the centre of this case took place. Brigitte sat with her grandmother and asked whether she was entirely certain she wanted to go through with this on Friday. In the recorded interview, she recounted the exchange to me word for word. GG said: “I’m gonna die on Friday.” Brigitte answered “You are they are going to *kill* you on Friday.” And her grandmother replied:

“They’re gonna kill me?”

GG wept for an extended period three quarters of an hour, by Brigitte’s recollection repeatedly saying that she had made a mistake. Brigitte comforted her and told her the truth, which was also the law if she had changed her mind, she had the absolute right to tell the medical team on Friday that she did not want to proceed.

That conversation took place one day after a physician deemed her capable of consenting to her death, and two days before that death was carried out. The next day, Thursday, the family kept MAiD out of the room entirely and simply spent hours with her and at the end of the visit, GG looked around the room she had lived in and remarked that it was lovely, and that when she moved, she would want a room like it.

July 10, the family arrived around nine on Friday morning and took GG out to the patio the wheelchair, the sunshine, the strawberry ice cream, the pastor on his way. The administrator’s push to start the IV nearly two hours early came within ten minutes, and was held off only by Brigitte’s refusal.

At approximately 10:20, they brought GG back to her room. The administrator began the IV insertion and to the family’s lasting distress asked Brigitte and Robert, who openly opposed the procedure, to assist by handing her medical supplies. When the rest of the family was called into the room moments later, they walked into what their statement describes without euphemism a significant, alarming amount of blood covering GG, the bedding, and the surrounding area more blood than Brigitte, in all her years managing her grandmother’s care, had ever seen result from a standard IV insertion.

The pastor prayed. GG closed her eyes and clasped her hands.

Then Dr. K arrived and attempted to speak with her. GG was silent, her hands fixed in prayer, and never gave Dr. K a verbal response of any kind. In the recorded interview, Brigitte recounted the physician’s words to her grandmother” Okay, Brigitte, I’m gonna give you your medicine”and what the physician said next, when no answer came:

“Okay, well, I’m just gonna get started then.”

The family had been assured, strictly and explicitly it is the reason, they say, that they did not attempt to physically halt the procedure that morning that GG would be required to give a final, explicit verbal confirmation immediately before the injection. They had been told by the medical team itself that only the patient could rescind consent, and that the last moment confirmation was the safeguard guaranteeing her that power. So when GG stayed silent, Brigitte felt relief wash over her and smiled at her husband, believing the mandatory safeguard had just held that silence, under the rule the team itself had stated, meant stop.

The team proceeded. As the medications were pushed, the family watched Dr. K encounter visible difficulty injecting one of the fluids through the line, pausing to exchange a look with the administrator that suggested a complication. A brief moment after the final medications went in, Dr. K confirmed that GG was gone.

The room fell silent. And in the days that followed through the removal of her belongings, the clearing of her room, the first stunned week of grief no one from the facility’s clinical team, by the family’s account, reached out to them at all.

What the law demands, and what the records must now show.

Strip the anguish out of this account and a set of narrow, documentary questions remains. Each has a paper answer.

Capacity, the Criminal Code requires that a person be capable with respect to decisions about their health at the time of assessment. The family describes a woman with a lifelong, un assessed cognitive impairment, profoundly deaf, freshly emerged from days of unresponsiveness her medication records cannot explain, who failed the factual questions of her own assessment so comprehensively that her family corrected the majority of her answers, and who, the following day, did not understand that “MAiD on Friday” meant she would die. Dr. K’s assessment notes, the MAR log, and the timeline will either withstand that account or they will not.

The request, when was the written request actually signed, who witnessed it, and was the signing before or after the procedure was scheduled? The family says after, completed by the facility’s own manager and witnessed by its staff, in secret. The dated documents will settle it.

Final consent, the code requires that immediately before administering MAiD, the practitioner give the person an opportunity to withdraw and ensure their express consent unless a written waiver of final consent was executed in advance, under the 2021 provision known as Audrey’s Amendment, while the person had capacity. The family was promised express final consent would be required; none was given. That leaves two possibilities and only two. Either the procedure was carried out without the final consent the law demands or a waiver exists that no one ever mentioned to the family, including while assuring them of the very safeguard it would nullify, signed at some point by a woman whose capacity is the central dispute of this case. Produce the waiver. Its date, its witness, and the capacity notes from the day it was signed.

The second assessment. The law requires two independent eligibility assessments. The family’s public account describes one. Who performed the other, when, and in what condition was GG at the time?

*** Requests for comment were made multiple times through phone and email request and neither Dr. K nor the nursing home chose to comment. We are waiting on the coroner report to release Dr. K’s full name, but we will be doing so in a piece once we confirm. ***

What the family is doing, and what happens next

The family is in the process of filing, the complaints this situation calls for: a police report identifying the location and personnel involved; a formal complaint to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario noting the existence of that report; and a comprehensive demand for records the death certificate and its listed cause, both assessments, the signed request and its witness, the complete MAR log, and any waiver of final consent. They have been advised not to be surprised if the death certificate, when it arrives, attributes GG’s death to cancer rather than to the injection that ended her life; federal guidance to certifiers permits exactly that.

They have also been told the records will come slowly, and that they will be encouraged at every stage to let it go. Their public statement suggests how likely that is. “Grief does not erase these documented lapses in transparency,” the family wrote, “nor does it excuse a system that felt entirely rushed, defensive, and calculated. We will forever live with the painful uncertainty of how long GG might have lived comfortably had nature been allowed to take its course.”

I have reviewed the family’s full written statement, conducted its own recorded interview, and will follow the documentary record wherever it leads including to the names of the facility and every practitioner involved, each of whom will be offered the chance to respond before being identified.

GG asked to be kept comfortable, to be surrounded by her family, and to have her pastor at her side. She told the people offering her death that her faith said no. The record now being assembled will establish, step by step and paper by paper, how a system built on the word *choice* took her from that refusal to a scheduled appointment in nine weeks and why, when she met its final safeguard with silence, the silence wasn’t enough.

Similar topic:

Our families experience with Medical Aid in Dying (Read).

How narrative control is narrowing Canada’s MAiD debate

This article was published by Alicia Duncan on July 2, 2026.

Alicia Duncan

The Cost of Certainty

By Alicia Duncan & Kelsi Sheren

Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) regime was built on a promise that has become central to public trust: that those seeking an assisted death may do so within a framework of careful safeguards designed to protect the vulnerable while respecting autonomy.

I came to this issue not through ideology, but through experience. In October 2021, my mother died by MAiD in British Columbia after a rapid decline marked by severe weight loss, chronic pain, psychiatric deterioration, disordered eating, and profound hopelessness. My family believed these circumstances raised serious questions about vulnerability, capacity, and whether her desire to die reflected enduring autonomy or the distortions of untreated mental suffering.

The questions we asked in the aftermath changed the course of my life. What began as a daughter’s attempt to understand how this could happen evolved into years of investigation involving Freedom of Information requests, regulatory complaints, and what became Canada’s first police investigation into a MAiD death. That work eventually led me to testify before parliamentary committees on two separate occasions and to discussions with policymakers in the United Kingdom and Scotland. It also became the foundation for my forthcoming book, The Other Side of the Straitjacket: A Daughter’s Story of Mental Illness and Assisted Dying.

What has struck me most over these years is not simply the polarization surrounding MAiD, but the increasingly narrow boundaries of acceptable discourse around it.

Every ethically serious medical practice should be able to tolerate scrutiny, especially one involving the intentional ending of human life. Yet in Canada’s MAiD debate, criticism is often treated less as a contribution to oversight than as a threat to the legitimacy of the system itself. Questions about safeguards are reframed as attacks on autonomy. Concerns about psychiatric vulnerability are dismissed as ideological opposition. Scientific uncertainty is presented to the public with a confidence that the underlying evidence does not always justify.

One of the clearest examples of this is the debate over the physiological effects of MAiD medications. Public discussion of this issue gained momentum following the work of Dr. Joel Zivot, an American anesthesiologist and expert in lethal injection pharmacology, who raised concerns during testimony before the Canadian Senate in 2021 as Canada was considering the expansion of its MAiD regime to include individuals whose natural death was not reasonably foreseeable. Zivot questioned whether the drug protocols used in assisted dying may, in some cases, lead to rapid fluid accumulation in the lungs—a condition known as pulmonary edema, which impairs oxygen exchange and, in severe cases, may produce a dying process he described as more akin to drowning.

His testimony raised an important question: how much do we actually know about the physiological effects of MAiD medications during the dying process?

Recently, I came across a Substack article from a MAiD advocacy platform criticizing military veteran and MAiD critic Kelsi Sheren for raising concerns about pulmonary edema during assisted dying. In dismissing those concerns, the authors wrote: “Perhaps the most common and harmful example is her claim that the MAiD medications cause fluid to build up in the lungs and cause the person to drown—which is completely untrue.”

I found that statement deeply troubling—not simply because I disagree with it, but because I possess evidence that directly challenges it.

Through Freedom of Information records, I obtained documentation of the precise medications and dosages administered to end my mother’s life. The protocol was neither unusual nor experimental. It matched the standard intravenous drug regimen recommended by the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP).

I also possess something extraordinarily rare in a MAiD case: an autopsy.

Because MAiD deaths are generally classified as expected deaths with a known cause, autopsies are seldom performed. As a result, post-mortem evidence examining the physiological effects of MAiD medications in real-world settings remains remarkably limited.

My mother’s autopsy documented pulmonary edema.

Whatever conclusions one draws from a single case, it leaves little room for absolutism.

I am not suggesting this proves pulmonary edema occurs in every MAiD death, nor that every patient experiences conscious respiratory distress. It does, however, establish an important point: pulmonary edema can occur after the administration of standard MAiD medications.

That makes the assertion that such concerns are “completely untrue” difficult to defend.

A more intellectually honest position would be to acknowledge that we do not yet know how often pulmonary edema occurs during MAiD, under what circumstances it develops, or what clinical significance it may carry, largely because the research simply has not been done.

I have attempted to engage directly with the authors of this Substack on this issue. I approached them in good faith, outlining the evidence in my possession and raising what I believe are legitimate questions about the physiological effects of MAiD and the troubling lack of meaningful clinical research in this area.

What I encountered was not curiosity, but defensiveness. And that, in many ways, captures the deeper problem.

Increasingly, I see advocacy groups, institutions, and stakeholders responding to questions about MAiD not by openly examining potential flaws in the system, but by protecting the system from scrutiny. The impulse is not to ask what might be missing from our understanding, but how confidence in the existing narrative can be preserved.

This is a pattern I know intimately. My family experienced it repeatedly after my mother’s death. Over time, I came to recognize this pattern as a form of institutional gaslighting. Not overt manipulation, but something subtler: selective framing, strategic omission, and unwavering certainty in areas where meaningful uncertainty remains.

The effect is profound. People begin to question what they witnessed, what they know, and whether their observations are legitimate—not because the evidence disproved them, but because the dominant narrative leaves no room for competing truths.

That principle matters profoundly in medicine, where progress has never depended on the defence of existing assumptions, but on the willingness to question them. Medicine advances because clinicians and researchers remain open to anomalies, willing to investigate uncomfortable evidence, and humble enough to acknowledge the limits of current knowledge. Ethical systems should demand no less of themselves.

That is why the growing defensiveness surrounding MAiD concerns me. Any system empowered to intentionally end life carries an extraordinary burden of accountability. Public trust in such a system cannot rest on polished messaging or categorical reassurance; it must be earned through transparency, rigorous scrutiny, and a genuine willingness to examine where safeguards may fail.

What concerns me most is not disagreement, nor even criticism. It is the gradual normalization of a culture in which difficult questions are treated as threats rather than as necessary components of ethical oversight. Once that happens, the goal subtly shifts. The priority is no longer understanding what is true, but preserving confidence in what is already believed.

That is a dangerous place for medicine—or for any institution entrusted with irreversible decisions—to operate.

Canadian government gives $289,226 to euthanasia podcast.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition has produced many excellent youtube video's that are available online.

Kathy Kortes-Miller

Thanks to researcher Patricia Maloney, who is an expert at filing government freedom of information (FOI) requests we have learned that Dr. Kathy M. Kortes-Miller, School of Social Work, at Lakehead University received $289,226 from the Canadian government for a series of podcasts titled: Disrupting Death; An examination of Canadian Experiences with Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).

Maloney wrote:

I listened to five episodes. It is a pro-euthanasia podcast, as one would expect. (Maybe other episodes will be more neutral and or against MAID but somehow I doubt it.)

$289,226 is not the only money given by the federal government to promote euthanasia.

Kortes-Miller has featured people who oppose euthanasia in her series.

In May 2023, Patricia Maloney uncovered that CAMAP, received $3,287,996 in funding from the Canadian government in 2021.

CAMAP is the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers which is the group that provides training and advocacy for doctors and nurse practitioners who are assessing and providing MAiD (euthanasia).

In September 2025, Kelsi Sheren pointed out that Health Canada was funding CAMAP's new Canadian Journal of MAiD, in their attempt to further normalize killing.

Kortes-Miller's podcast series was featured in the second issue of the Canadian Journal of MAiD.

The Canadian Journal of MAiD planning committee (Link).

Patricia Maloney will continue by researching:

1. What other grants that promote and celebrate MAID are likewise hidden in the Open Government database?
2. What are the chances that the government would also fund an anti-MAID podcast?

Thank you Patricia for you continual research. 

Is it a choice when a veteran with PTSD can’t see a way out?

This article was published by Kelsi Sheren her substack on June 24, 2026.

Kelsi Sheren rebuts Catherine Ford’s recent piece: Everyone should have the same or equal rights

Why would we deny him his right to suicide prevention?

Catherine Ford of the Calgary Herald wants equal rights. So do I.

But here’s the question she didn’t ask in her June 24th column: equal right to what, exactly? Because the right she’s describing the right to a medically assisted death when your pain is psychiatric is not the only right on the table. There’s another one. The right to be fought for. The right to have the system stand between you and the worst moment of your life instead of handing you a form.

That right is called suicide prevention and in Canada right now, it is not equally distributed.

I served in Afghanistan. I came home. I watched what the system did and didn’t do for the people I served with. I have testified before Parliament on veteran suicide, on MAID, and on the gap between what we promise the people who put on a uniform and what we actually deliver. So when Ford writes about choice, I need her to sit with something specific.

A veteran with PTSD who cannot see a way out is not making a free choice. He is making a choice inside a tunnel. His nervous system has been altered by what he witnessed. His access to quality psychiatric care has been inadequate because Veterans Affairs wait times are documented, the underfunding is documented, the failures are documented. The tunnel he is standing in was partly built by institutional neglect.

Ford calls the parliamentary committee’s recommendation to exclude mental illness as a sole criterion “cruelty.” I call it the first responsible thing a committee has done on this file in a decade. Not because people with mental illness don’t suffer. They do. Profoundly, but because “irremediable” is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence, and we have not been honest about what it means.

Irremediable compared to what treatment? The treatment we haven’t provided yet? The therapy that has a two-year waitlist? The psychiatrist who isn’t available in the rural community where this person lives? We are declaring conditions irremediable in a system that has never fully tried to remediate them. That is not a medical standard. That is a budget decision dressed up as compassion.

Ford anchors her argument in autonomy. Fine. Then let’s apply that standard consistently and see where it takes us.

A thirteen-year-old girl is targeted by an algorithm. Instagram surfaces content specifically calibrated to deepen her body dysmorphia. She develops an eating disorder. She wants to harm herself. Her suffering is real. It is documented. By the logic Ford is advancing that mental pain is pain, that psychiatric suffering deserves the same access as physical suffering, that we cannot treat some Canadians as “dependent children incapable of making their own decisions” on what principled basis does that girl not qualify?

I already know the answer Ford would give. She would say that’s not what she meant. That there are safeguards. That minors are different.

But that’s the problem. Once you accept that the state’s role is to facilitate death for those whose psychiatric suffering is deemed irremediable, you need a bright, defensible line about who qualifies. Canada does not have one. Belgium and the Netherlands, which have had this framework longer, do. They’ve used it on minors. They’ve used it on people whose primary diagnosis was depression and social isolation. That is not a slippery slope argument. It is what the data shows actually happened.

Ford writes that forcing some Canadians to live is cruel. I’d ask her to consider the inverse. Is it not cruel to build a system where the answer to “I can’t go on” is “we can help with that” rather than “why not, and what haven’t we tried?”

The veteran with PTSD deserves every resource this country has. He deserves peer support workers who’ve been downrange. He deserves access to treatments including psychedelic-assisted therapy, which has shown significant clinical results for treatment-resistant PTSD and which Canada has been unconscionably slow to make accessible. He deserves a system that exhausts every option before it considers the last one.

What he does not deserve is a country that skips to the end because the beginning and the middle are expensive.

Ford is right that successive Canadian governments have punted this question down the road. But she has misidentified the punt. The failure wasn’t in delaying MAID expansion. The failure was in never building the mental health infrastructure that would make “irremediable” a meaningful word rather than a bureaucratic shortcut.

Equal rights. Yes. I’m for it.

Every Canadian equally deserves a system that fights for their life before it ends it. Every Canadian equally deserves a psychiatric care system funded at the same level as emergency cardiac care. Every Canadian equally deserves to have their crisis treated as a crisis — not a decision.

That is the equal right we are not having the conversation about and until we do, I am not prepared to call a death-first system compassionate.

Kelsi Sheren is a Canadian disabled combat veteran, Author of Do No Harm? and host of The Kelsi Sheren Perspective. She has testified before Parliament on veteran suicide, MAID, and psychedelic therapy.

They finally blinked.

This article was published by Kelsi Sheren on her substack on June 15, 2026.

I would have qualified.

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.

Kiano Vafaeian was 26.

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

Join the EPC zoom event on June 17. Ten years of killing, what's next?

Join the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition on June 17, 2026 at 2 pm (Eastern Time)  (Registration Link) for one hour of information followed by discussion as we reflect on 10 years of legal euthanasia (poisoning people to death) in Canada.

We will discuss how and why Canada expanded it's killing regime, what the law actual says, and where we should go from here.

Register for free in advance for this zoom event on June 17 at 2 pm (Eastern Time): (Registration Link).

The world is shocked by Canada's killing machine, it is time for Canada to provide a complete review of the law. It is time for Canada to begin to dismantle the killing machine it has built. 

This is a sad occasion as Canada surpassed 100,000 known euthanasia deaths, since legalization, in April 2026. The number of euthanasia deaths is disturbing. The reasons for these killings are often terrifying.

 We oppose killing people. 

Presenters will include: Gordon Friesen, EPC President, Alex Schadenberg, EPC Executive Director, and Kelsi Sheren. 

We will be sharing crucial information. Time will be provided for your questions. 

Register for free for this informative zoom event on June 17 at 2 pm (ET): (Registration Link).

He Sold Death On Shopify. Canada Built The Market.

This article was published on Kelsi Sheren’s Substack on June 2, 2026.

By Kelsi Sheren

I want you to think about a 16 year old.

Not hypothetically. An actual kid. In Ontario. Who went online, found a website, placed an order, and received a package in the mail containing the means to end their life.

The man who sent it just pled guilty.

Article: Canadian man pleads guilty to aiding suicide in 14 deaths (Read).

Fourteen counts. Fourteen dead in Ontario alone. Seventy-nine more in Britain being factored into sentencing. At least 130 total. Shipped to 41 countries. Nearly $300,000 in revenue. Consultation calls included. Documentation that explicitly absolved him of responsibility for “the end use of its products.”

Kenneth Law ran a death business and it was booming.

He built multiple storefronts on Shopify. Named them things like Imtime Cuisine and EscMode. Sold hot sauce alongside the poison to make it look like a food company. Put “SN” in the logo a nod to ... for the customers who knew what they were actually buying. Bundled gas masks and nitrogen regulators with the kits. Offered consultation calls. Sent 1,209 packages to 41 countries and collected $300,000 through Shopify and PayPal like any other Canadian small business.

He’s going to get 14 years. Maximum. If the court actually delivers that. We find out in September.

Murder charges? Dropped. Plea deal. Aiding suicide. Cleaner charge. Lighter optics. The same way everything in this country gets softened when the subject is death.

Here’s what nobody wants to say out loud.

Canada spent a decade telling its own people that death is a solution. We built the infrastructure. We wrote the billing codes. We trained the practitioners. We gave it a name that sounds like a spa treatment Medical Assistance in Dying and we put it in hospitals next to maternity wards. We expanded it and expanded it again and we’re about to expand it to people whose only condition is a mental illness.

We did not create Kenneth Law. But we absolutely created his customer base.

You don’t spend ten years normalizing the idea that suffering is best resolved by dying and then act confused when someone builds a business around it. He didn’t manufacture demand. He found it and he packaged it behind a hot sauce label. He shipped it to a 16-year-old in Ontario and two other children who weren’t supposed to be able to order at all and somehow did anyway.

The same week Law pled guilty, Canada quietly crossed 100,000 MAiD MURDERS since 2016.

One hundred thousand.

That number got less coverage than a mid-level political scandal. It landed with almost no noise. Because we’ve normalized it so thoroughly that six figures doesn’t register as a crisis anymore. It registers as a program working as intended.

I am a combat veteran. I have been assessed as eligible for MAiD under Canada’s current criteria. I’ve said that to Parliament. I’ve said it on Triggernometry. I’ll keep saying it until someone in power feels the weight of what that means. I’ll keep saying it until someone in power feels the weight of what that means.

The system doesn’t distinguish between a soldier who survived war and a teenager who found a website. It just sees suffering it can close a file on.

Kenneth Law saw the same thing. He just didn’t have a medical license.

He’s going to prison. That’s correct, but the ideology that made his product desirable that gave it cultural permission, that built the demand, that told an entire generation of vulnerable people that death is a reasonable off-ramp for pain that’s still fully operational.

Still funded.
Still expanding.
Still coming for people I know.

The dead don’t talk. The families are traumatized and mostly silent. The practitioners who approved the deaths are protected by law. And the people who designed the whole system are still writing op-eds about dignity and compassion and calling critics emotional.

I’m angry, pissed off and over people accepting this. You should be too.

Families are Traumatized and Dead People Don't Talk

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Last week a story about Dr James MacLean, who works, along with his wife, with the Westmount Family Physicians in London, Ontario, met Thomas Dillon outside a Tim Horton's in St. Thomas, Ontario on June 27, 2023 where he assessed him for MAiD (medical homicide). MacLean assessed Dillon over a coffee, and possibly a donut, to decide if Dillon should live or die.

Kelsi Sheren explains in her substack:

On January 29, 2024, MacLean picked Thomas up again at the Tim Hortons and drove him personally to a room inside an industrial unit where cadavers are prepared for funeral transport. That’s where Thomas Dillon died. His family didn’t know where he was and his sister had shown up to the Tim Hortons. Thomas refused to let her ride along. The doctor drove him instead.

Dillon's sister

Dillon's family told the Globe and Mail reporter that he should not have been approved for medical homicide based on his physical and mental health.

Another complaint was filed against MacLean for how he did a medical homicide. Brian Williams and Sharon Kirkey wrote a report published by the London Free Press on May 27, 2026 that:

He’d (MacLean) ordered a MAID medication kit, but it wasn’t ready when he arrived at the pharmacy. He went to the home with a kit he already had.

According to the college, MacLean administered a sedative follow by propofol, a drug used during surgery that, in high doses, puts people in a coma.

The final drug customarily used paralyzes the muscles. Deprived of oxygen, organs shut down, one by one, until the heart finally stops.

But MacLean was unable to find the neuromuscular-blocking drug in his kit.

MacLean declared the man dead, when he wasn't dead, he left the scene of the crime, he was then informed that the victim wasn't dead yet, so MacLean returned and pumped him with more lethal poison. The family was traumatized.

I questioned in my previous article, if MacLean used left-over drugs from a previous killing?

There are many more instances of careless killings and traumatized families.

I was recently contacted by a family who's father was killed by medical homicide. The family was opposed to the killing but the father had agreed to get it done.

Killing kit items used to kill their father

The father was scheduled to die on a Tuesday, but since he lived in a rural area, the killing kit was delivered on the Friday (first shock). When the nurse practitioner arrived on the Tuesday to do the deed, the family left the house, as they didn't want to witness the killing.

When the family returned they found a dead father and the items from the killing kit that had everything in it that was used to kill their father, including some items with bodily fluids on it and left-over poison.

It is bad enough that the father was killed but to leave the kit behind was traumatizing.

This was not a MacLean killing but the fact that MacLean only received a slap on the wrist (6 months of oversight) is ridiculous. 

Euthanasia activists suggest that the law is working. MacLean made mistakes, but he was caught and he is now being punished. I guess it doesn't matter that Dillon's family have no idea how his death was approved, but of course, Dead People Don't Talk.

These cases are the tip of the iceberg since relevant witnesses, in these cases, are dead and the families are traumatized and usually unwilling to file a complaint.