Alicia and Christie Duncan initially received just 48 hours’ notice that their mother was due to die through Canada’s assisted-dying system.
On Sunday, October 24, 2021, 61-year-old Donna told her family she had been approved for Medical Assistance in Dying, commonly known as MAiD.
Her death was scheduled for the following Tuesday under Canada’s expedited “Track 1” pathway, which applies when a person’s natural death is considered reasonably foreseeable.
Yet her daughters say Donna was not terminally ill. Instead, they believe she was experiencing a severe mental health crisis that began after a car accident and worsened during the isolation of the Covid-19 lockdown.
The retired psychiatric nurse had begun behaving in ways her family found deeply troubling. She was so fearful of being shot by a sniper that she would not leave her home, and she spent $6,000 on a “medical” psychic who warned her about heavy metals allegedly contaminating her food.
Determined to stop their mother’s death, Alicia and Christie contacted police and convinced a judge to issue an emergency arrest warrant under the Mental Health Act. The order would have moved Donna to a psychiatric ward.
But after the process began, the sisters felt MAiD had become unavoidable. Donna was released from the ward without their knowledge and died by lethal injection that Friday.
The sisters never had the chance to say goodbye. The next time they saw their mother was at the crematorium.
Donna Duncan, left, pictured with her daughter, Alicia Duncan, right
Donna Duncan died on October 29, 2021, after MAiD practitioners determined she was on a “foreseeable trajectory” towards death due to malnutrition
According to her daughters, Donna Duncan was suffering from a mental health crisis when she was approved for MAiD
Under Canadian government guidelines, a person seeking MAiD must have decision-making capacity and a “grievous and irremediable medical condition.”
Alicia and Christie believe their mother did not have the mental capacity to make that decision. They say that once the application was underway, however, the system worked against their efforts to intervene.
Alicia said medical professionals appeared determined to complete the process after the initial application, moving with what she described as the impersonal efficiency of workers on a factory production line.
“If the safeguards aren’t strict, there will be fatalities for people that should not have died, who just needed help to live. They needed help to live, not help to die,” the 43-year-old told Our News Outlet.
She views her mother’s death as evidence of a wider failure in Canada’s system, arguing that loopholes in the legislation have enabled approvals involving conditions such as hearing loss, Type 2 diabetes and frailty.
Alicia now campaigns for tougher safeguards in end-of-life legislation. Her goal is to protect vulnerable people who might have chosen to keep living if they had received adequate healthcare and support.
Her activism is rooted in the post-traumatic stress disorder she says was triggered when she unzipped her mother’s body bag at the crematorium and saw the mark left by the intravenous line in Donna’s wrist.
“I have absolutely experienced sanctuary trauma,” Alicia said, referring to the harm caused when service providers fail or hurt people who have turned to them for help.
“I do not trust the system anymore. I can’t.”
Alicia Duncan now campaigns for stricter safeguards in end-of-life legislation
Before the car accident in February 2020, Donna was a beacon of light, occupying a pivotal role in her children and grandchildren’s everyday lives.
‘She had devoted her career to helping patients with mental health issues. She was bright and animated and fun,’ says Alicia.
‘She was the light in her family, she was the rock, she was my best friend. We travelled the world together.’
But over the next 20 months, Donna started to change, almost beyond recognition.
She was only diagnosed with a concussion, but such an ailment did not account for her dramatic weight loss.
Nor did it explain the sprawling list of other bizarre symptoms, which increasingly baffled doctors.
Donna claimed that digesting food felt like she was ‘swallowing shards of glass’, so she insisted on pureeing everything she ate.
She complained that her skin was inconsolably sensitive to light, so she insisted on only going outside if she was wearing a visor and sunglasses.
Her skin, she claimed, also became excessively sensitive to materials, so she took to wearing her clothes inside-out, and using 40 safety pins to secure her bed sheets to her mattress, thereby eradicating every wrinkle.
‘She was only eating about six different ingredients,’ Alicia recalls. ‘I had to pick up a specific chicken, from a specific grocery store, with only specific spices.’
She was convinced other food contained harmful metals.
Donna diagnosed herself with central sensitization syndrome (CSS), a condition where the central nervous system becomes hyperactive and amplifies nerve signals, causing ordinary touch to feel overwhelmingly painful.
But her daughters questioned the diagnosis, not least because of moments when the supposed ultra-sensitivity disappeared, such as when Donna asked Alicia to ‘scrub harder’ when she was bathing her in the psychiatric unit, days before her death.
‘I don’t want to hurt your skin,’ Alicia told her.
‘It’s not on the outside, it’s on the inside,’ her mother replied.
‘Then why are you wearing your clothes inside out?’ Alicia questioned.
‘Then, she got quiet and stopped saying anything,’ she says, reflecting on the incident now.
Donna’s personality also changed.
She cut all her hair off. She stopped bathing. She had manic episodes, where she would lose control and shout obscenities.
She refused to accept antidepressants from her GP, and refused to try any treatment that did not match her own self-diagnosis.
Rather than CSS, Alicia speculates her mother was having a mental breakdown, exacerbated by her inability to receive proper treatment following the car accident due to the pandemic.
She was also starving herself by eating 800 calories a day – a symptom of her depression – but also as a way of proving to MAiD assessors that she was physically sick.
Such a theory was originally shared by doctors less than a month before her death – who completed a psychiatric assessment and diagnosed her with a psychosomatic disorder, where any physical symptoms were the result of mental and emotional distress.
The theory was convincing enough for the judge to grant an emergency arrest warrant, in an attempt to prevent the euthanasia.
But on Friday, October 29, Donna died by lethal injection, after MAiD practitioners determined she was on a ‘foreseeable trajectory’ towards death due to malnutrition.
In the months leading up to her assisted death, Donna Duncan was increasingly paranoid and her behaviour appeared erratic, according to her daughters
Alicia had originally never heard of MAiD.
When Donna’s common-law partner, Rick, began using the term in conversation, in the month leading up to her death, she assumed he was referring to housekeeping.
It was only on Thursday, October 14, 2021, that the penny dropped.
Alicia was preparing to take a holiday to Scottsdale, Arizona, with her partner and daughter.
Her mother was sick, but she was relieved following the psychosomatic diagnosis from October 6.
She hoped that diagnosis would mark the beginning of a new era, where the family would be able to band together to support Donna through her depressive spiral.
Her phone lit up with a text from Rick.
Attached was a link to a document named ‘Dignity with Dying Canada’.
She lost her breath, and was convinced some kind of mistake had been made.
Her mother wasn’t dying – she was sure of it.
The following Friday, on October 22, Rick texted her again.
Donna had already completed her first MAiD assessment, and another doctor was expected to visit on Sunday morning.
She had been accepted onto the programme, and things moved quickly from there.
‘I was completely in shock. Everything around me was muffled and I started shaking,’ Alicia says.
She rushed home. Christie, her sister, called the police.
But the officers turned up at the house, and left, after concluding that Donna was neither in danger nor ‘sectionable’.
‘The doctor has approved me for MAiD. I will be transitioning in two days,’ the mother told her daughters on Sunday.
‘It was just blow after blow after blow,’ Alicia says.
‘It’s like you’re drowning and you’re trying to come up for air, and every time you get a breath, you’re just shoved back down.’
She called every lawyer she could get ahold of across Canada.
‘We were systematically told that they didn’t have time, or that no one had the expertise to take this case on, or that there were conflicts of interest because the law firms represented health authorities.
‘There was nothing that we could legally do.’
On Monday, Alicia and Christie persuaded a judge into granting them a last-minute arrest warrant under the Mental Health Act, which would see Donna transferred to a psychiatric ward.
But Donna was quickly discharged, after she was deemed sound of mind.
On Tuesday, Alicia and Christie accepted that their time was up, and visited their mother to say goodbye.
When they arrived at her home, Rick informed them the MAiD appointment had been delayed earlier in the day, and Donna had attempted to take her own life.
She was admitted back into the psychiatric ward on Wednesday, and was discharged without her daughters’ knowledge on Friday.
Four hours after being released, she died by lethal injection.
Alicia found out via a text message, that Rick had sent to her partner.
Donna had ‘died peacefully – as per her wishes’.
In August, Alicia released a book documenting her story, called ‘The Other Side of the Straitjacket’, using the same title of the book that her mother always wanted to write about her time as a psychiatric nurse, but never managed to
Alicia believes that as a psychiatric nurse, Donna knew how to convince authorities she had the capacity to choose a medically assisted death, even though she had mental illness of her own.
A year later, the police opened an investigation into the 61-year-old’s death, after her daughters claimed that their mother should not have been approved for the procedure, given her mental health at the time.
Donna became the first known MAiD death in Canada to be investigated by police.
But the investigation ground to a halt when the Fraser Health Authority refused to hand over the relevant records – the MAiD assessments themselves – to the police, citing privacy protections.
In August, Alicia released a memoir documenting her story, called ‘The Other Side of the Straitjacket’, using the same title of the book that her mother always wanted to write about her time as a psychiatric nurse, but never managed to.
Alicia had promised her she would design the cover.
Since Donna’s death, Alicia uses her platform to raise awareness about the dangers inherent in end-of-life legislation which does not adequately screen patients for mental capacity.
She presented evidence to parliament in the UK in February 2025 in the lead-up to the vote on assisted dying in June 2025.
‘Proponents of euthanasia frame it as compassionate, but Canada’s experience shows how vague language, inadequate oversight, and insufficient safeguards can result in systemic failures,’ her statement said.
Proposals tabled by Labour’s Kim Leadbeater in 2024 to legalise assisted dying cleared the House of Commons on June 20 last year, with a majority of 23.
But the bill did not clear all its stages in the Lords, with peers tabling more than 1,200 amendments.
In June this year, Labour MP Lauren Edwards brought forward the proposals again in an attempt to ensure peers could ‘finish their job’.
She said her decision was above all about democracy and that the bill ‘was prevented from passing only by the decision of a minority in the House of Lords to talk it out and stop it coming to a vote’.
But on Friday, MPs voted against the fresh move to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales, after the bill was defeated by 270 MPs voting for and 286 voting against.
Canada has one of the highest rates of euthanasia in the world, with MAiD accounting for 4.7 per cent of the deaths in 2023.
‘People with disabilities are the most at risk,’ says Alicia.
‘We already know that when people with disabilities go to the hospital, they are already at a disadvantage for getting care
‘There is so much pressure in society. People are no longer dignified. It’s almost like this qualitative scale that we have, and if you can’t financially contribute to a society, then you inherently have less dignity than someone who does.’
She says such ideas are dangerous.
The year Donna died, Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Office put out a report estimating that $86.9million was saved through the MAiD system, as an alternative to palliative care.
‘We know that the majority of a person’s lifetime medical costs are in the last stages of their life, and so if you can eliminate those stages, it means massive savings for the government.
‘This is not conspiratorial.’
