10-year anniversary of MAID in Canada invites love, pain and shame

TORONTO — For some, the 10th anniversary of Canada legalizing medical assistance in dying might evoke a peaceful memory of their loved one’s final moments.

Others who long to die but are ineligible for MAID because their sole condition is a mental illness may find the date sinks them further into the pain of waiting.

Then there are those who feel shame that this country offers death as a solution to suffering.

A decade after MAID was first introduced in Canada, opinions are far more divided than they were at the outset. The legal framework has evolved and allowed more people to choose to die in this way while also delaying further planned expansions.

The Canadian Press spoke to four people whose lives have been altered by MAID in vastly different ways as the anniversary approaches Wednesday.

EVIE WALLACE

It was a secret that Hugh Wallace received MAID in April 2016, two months before the law came into place June 17 of that year.

Not a secret in the sense that it was illegal – they had the court’s approval – but it was unheard of, very hush-hush, his wife Evie Wallace says, recalling her husband’s last breath in the house he built more than 50 years ago in a forested area west of Calgary.

Hugh Wallace had lived with multiple sclerosis for 35 years, but it was after he was diagnosed with non-curable small cell lung cancer, just months before MAID would become legal, that he brought his case before an Alberta judge and asked for early eligibility.

“Like dominos falling one by one I have progressively lost nearly all mobility, most of my hearing, my vision, ability to urinate and most recently my voice; soon it will be my appetite, consciousness and breathing,” Hugh, who was 75, wrote in a letter to the court.

“If there are small pockets of pleasure in my life, they appear few and far between as the tightrope I’ve been walking for 23 years with my MS has suddenly thinned even more with my irremediable lung cancer. I still walk the tightrope but it is clearly leading me into a dark tunnel with no light at the end.”

The judge was convinced. Days later, Evie Wallace can remember the collective anxiety in the room, not just for her family, but for the health providers poised to carry out Hugh’s wish. None of them had ever done what they were about to do, she recalls. There was no one to ask what to expect or how it might feel when it was all over.

Her husband was asleep within seconds. “We could actually see the pain leaving Hugh’s face,” Wallace says in a video call, lifting her hands to her own face and lowering them to her heart.

Hugh was a pragmatic man with a scientific mind who felt there was no dignity left to living, she says. He was an engineer in the core of his being and he wanted to control his departure.

“We keep thinking that it’s all about death, but it isn’t. It’s about life.”

CLAIRE BROSSEAU

By her own account, Claire Brosseau’s life ended years ago, yet she’s never been more publicly visible as her pursuit of death draws international attention.

“I was never supposed to be alive this long,” Brosseau says while seated at a round black table in her Toronto apartment, her fluffy Maltipoo, Olive, resting on her lap.

Over the past 35 years, she’s been treated for bipolar disorder, an eating disorder, substance use disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder but says nothing reaches the invisible pain that lives inside her.

Brosseau planned to apply for MAID years ago when it was set to become available to people suffering solely from a mental illness. The federal government asked a group of experts in 2021 to study and ensure proper safeguards were in place first. They temporarily delayed the expansion until 2023, and then until 2024, and most recently to 2027.

Every time, Brosseau says she felt winded by the gut-punch of the government kicking the can down the road.

“I don’t think that they think about what it does to us,” she says, shaking her head. All she wants is a non-violent end to her life, one that doesn’t risk traumatizing her family, she adds.

Brosseau says she’s spent decades feeling trapped by a whiplash of manic and depressive states, describing it as like standing on the ledge of a building and wanting to jump, but also believing she can fly.

“Imagine living in that every day. It’s not sustainable. That’s the only way that I can explain the pain. Because the pain is all over inside me and people can’t see it,” says Brosseau.

After the government’s 2024 delay, she joined a court battle arguing that the exclusion of people whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness is a breach of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

After two years, Brosseau says she felt the need to convey the level of urgency she feels. In May, she asked the court for a constitutional exemption to grant her emergency relief to receive MAID.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she says.

Her story and court battle have played out publicly in the media on an international level.

The irony of her hyper-visibility is not lost on Brosseau as she tries to disappear. She’s cut off friends, ended a fruitful career as a comic and actor, and halted any semblance of a life beyond the walls of her apartment. Her entire existence revolves around a desire to die, she says.

“I’m not alive and I’m not a person, while fighting to be seen as a person,” she says as she nears her first date in court next month.

“This is an impossible, unsustainable life. My heart is beating, but so are people on life support.”

ISABEL GRANT

Criminal law professor Isabel Grant remembers reading the draft legislation for Track 2 of MAID in 2020, which opened eligibility to people with disabilities.

“I was just kind of shaken, frankly, that being disabled and suffering intolerably was a basis for a doctor or a nurse practitioner legally ending somebody’s life,” Grant says from Vancouver, where she teaches homicide law at the University of British Columbia.

She worries about how people with disabilities are left to feel, knowing that the country offers death as a solution to their suffering, rather than increasing support for the challenging circumstances they face.

“I am a law professor. I’m a lawyer. I work within a legal system, and I was ashamed that the system within which I work had done this.”

Grant communicated these concerns to Parliament through testimony at House of Commons and Senate committee hearings. She says she has addressed federal committees numerous times before as a criminal law scholar and that normally, she is treated with respect and asked genuine questions about her expertise.

“That’s not the case with MAID,” she says.

“You tend to meet, to be confronted, by people who have very strong opinions on one side or the other, and are there for you to confirm those opinions, those beliefs. It’s a much more hostile environment.”

Grant is involved in a constitutional challenge launched by an organization that argues Track 2 violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by discriminating against people with disabilities. It wants the court to strike it down.

When introducing Track 2, the federal government rolled out revised safeguards meant to ensure adequate time and expertise are dedicated to assessing the eligibility of people whose death is not near. That includes informing a person about disability supports, and offering professional consultations. The process must take at least 90 days, unless the person will lose capacity to make decisions in that time.

But from Grant’s perspective, the only safeguard that would protect people with disabilities is the criteria of a reasonably foreseeable death.

Government data shows less than five per cent of people receiving MAID in 2024 were considered Track 2. Of those cases, more than 61 per cent of respondents self-identified as having a disability.

The two simultaneous Charter challenges – advocating for Track 2 to be repealed in one and to be expanded to mental illness in the other – speaks to starkly contradictory interpretations of the Charter, she says.

Both parties have filed evidence and are waiting for the government’s response. Neither has been tested in court.

“I think this debate really speaks to the divide about what the Charter was intended to protect and do from the outset.”

DR. GERALD ASHE

In his home office, Dr. Gerald Ashe reaches for an ornately embossed leather journal above his desk. It falls open to a black and white photo of a man, Ashe’s handwritten notes written overtop.

“They played a major part of my life, all of those patients,” Ashe says, flipping through pages that memorialize people to whom he has provided MAID since 2016.

In 2021, he wrote about the “unique milestone” of assisting 100 people.

As a family doctor and palliative care physician in Brockville, Ont., he says he had many patients whose suffering he could not relieve. Two stand out in his mind. Both were head and neck cancer patients who died by suicide the year before MAID would have been available to them.

“It just stuck with me that there are some patients (for whom) we are not going to be able to solve their suffering,” says Ashe.

Early on, Ashe saw MAID as an extension of palliative care. He felt he could “bear the burden” of shortening a person’s life by a few months or days. He had seen firsthand how agonizing that period could be.

But he was not prepared to take on patients who were not dying, “despite the fact that they may be suffering greatly.”

It wasn’t that Ashe was opposed to Track 2, but he just did not feel comfortable assisting in those deaths.

“Most of my work arose out of palliative care. And (in) palliative care, by definition, people have a foreseeable death,” Ashe says.

Ashe is now semi-retired, but continues to provide MAID because there is only one other doctor doing so in the Brockville, Ont., area he serves.

It’s understandable that other physicians would not want to take on such a great responsibility, he says, but he worries about there being less access as a result.

“I feel the need to ensure that there’s going to be the availability of MAID for our patient population,” he says.

The government’s latest report on MAID suggests there is a small number of providers who handle a large portion of cases. Data shows 4.5 per cent of practitioners that provided MAID in 2024 were responsible for 37.5 per cent of all cases.

“I don’t know what we are going to do in the future.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 15, 2026.

Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.

Hannah Alberga, The Canadian Press