When Canadian pensioner Brigitte Stegemann died at her care home in July, her final moments were far removed from the calm, dignified farewell families hope for at the end of a loved one’s life.
The 83-year-old, who was born in Germany and was living with cancer, was connected to an IV by a nurse who allegedly had difficulty inserting the needle and was not wearing gloves. She was then administered a fatal medication.
As Stegemann lay dying, her relatives—led by her fiercely devoted granddaughter, Brigitte Kranendonk—were engaged in a painful dispute with care-home staff and practitioners involved in Canada’s controversial euthanasia system. At the heart of the conflict was whether the deeply religious woman had ever truly wanted to end her life.
Kranendonk told Our News Outlet that one point appeared beyond dispute: in her view, the carers were determined for Stegemann to become the latest patient—and, critics might say, victim—of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program, known as MAiD.
Under MAiD, doctors and nurses can assist an eligible person in ending their life with that individual’s consent. Applicants must be at least 18, capable of giving informed consent and living with a “grievous and irremediable medical condition.”
They are also supposed to receive detailed information about their diagnosis, available treatments and palliative-care options before deciding. Their choice must be made voluntarily, without pressure or outside influence. When the system was introduced a decade ago, it was restricted to patients considered likely to die soon.
Kranendonk said her grandmother, a committed Christian diagnosed with stage-four stomach cancer roughly five months before her death, had repeatedly explained that euthanasia conflicted with her religious beliefs and personal convictions.
As the granddaughter named after Stegemann and the holder of her power of attorney, Kranendonk said she informed managers at the Pearl care home in Ontario that the family opposed euthanasia. She also questioned whether Stegemann remained mentally capable of making such a consequential decision without assistance.
Brigitte Kranendonk with her grandmother, Brigitte Stegemann, the Canadian pensioner who died in July under Canada’s controversial euthanasia program
Members of Stegemann’s family, led by her devoted granddaughter Brigitte Kranendonk, became embroiled in a bitter dispute with her carers
Kranendonk alleges that the care home moved to speed up the euthanasia process while she was away on a 10-day road trip with her husband. When she returned, she said, the procedure had already progressed to a disturbing extent.
“The nurse became very abrasive, very defensive,” Kranendonk told Our News Outlet. “She was like, ‘Well, I’m just trying to advocate for her. I’m just trying to do what’s right for her.’”
Kranendonk said the nurse viewed the family as “an obstacle.” “We were getting in the way of her doing MAiD on my grandmother,” she said. “I think she really, truly believes that MAiD is the best for people—and shame on me for trying to stop that.”
The care home and MAiD officials have not publicly addressed the allegations.
MAiD can be carried out in one of two ways: a doctor or nurse administers a fatal substance, most commonly by injection, or the patient takes a prescribed drug themselves.
Stegemann’s family is not alone in alleging that a relative was improperly—or unlawfully—encouraged to end their life through an assisted-dying system that opponents say has expanded far beyond its original limits.
Canada, which has long promoted itself as a compassionate nation, now has a system accounting for roughly one in every 10 deaths. That figure is higher than the number of deaths attributed to diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease combined, and exceeds rates in some countries that legalized assisted dying years earlier.
From the introduction of MAiD by Canada’s national Parliament in 2016 through the end of 2024, approximately 765,475 people had died through the program. A practice once treated as culpable homicide was transformed almost overnight into an act framed as compassionate care, giving people greater control over when their lives end.
Yet Canadian liberal politicians soon encountered the dilemma behind that shift: once personal autonomy becomes the central principle, it can be difficult to reject a request from someone who says life is no longer bearable or worth living.
A 2021 amendment further broadened the law by removing the requirement that a person’s death be reasonably foreseeable. Applicants now need to demonstrate that their condition is “intolerable” and cannot “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable”—language critics argue is dangerously broad and open to subjective interpretation.
MAiD supporters are pushing hard to extend eligibility beyond the physically ill to those with mental illnesses – a hugely contentious amendment, say experts, given that many people suffering from depression will at some time become suicidal.
Politicians have repeatedly delayed expanding MAiD in this way, but the proposal may become law in 2027. Opponents say mental health from assisted dying provisions is a violation of the Canadian constitution.
Canada’s parliament has also recommended the age limit be lowered so children can also choose to be euthanized while the Quebec College of Physicians has called for it to be legal to kill severely ill or disabled newborns.
Meanwhile, thousands of Canadians have not even had much opportunity to change their mind about dying as they are given the lethal injection on the same day that their MAiD request is approved.
If a doctor refuses to sign off the request, patients can shop around for one who is more amenable. And unlike other countries, including Belgium and the Netherlands, where euthanasia is also legal, Canadian patients are not required to have exhausted all treatment alternatives first. The vast majority of MAiD applications are approved.
Perhaps it is little wonder that the world’s most permissive government-assisted suicide program has been hit by a steady stream of controversies that critics say only prove that it’s madness to widen its scope.
The opposition is not only religious. Some have gone so far as to compare Canada’s runaway euthanasia system to the Nazis’ mass extinction of ‘undesirables’ such as the disabled on the grounds they were ‘polluting’ the Aryan gene pool.
Professor Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, described Canada’s law as ‘probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.’
Madeline Li, a Toronto cancer psychiatrist and assisted dying adviser, has admitted Canada has pushed the boundaries and ‘made MAiD so open you can request it for basically any reason,’ including simply being ‘tired of life.’
The backlash contrasts sharply with the complacent dismissal by Canada’s Supreme Court in 2015 of fears of a ‘descent down a slippery slope into homicide’ as just scaremongering. The court overturned a euthanasia ban after ruling it was unconstitutional as it deprived people of dignity and autonomy.
Canadian officials aren’t trying to ensure racial purity as the Nazis did, but they are struggling to cope with an over-stretched social welfare net.
Some MAiD cases, ranging from a Paralympian struggling to get a stairlift to those fearing homelessness, have boiled down to people’s straitened economic circumstances, prompting opponents to coin a new trend – ‘poverty euthanasia’ – to describe those who decide they have no better option than state-assisted suicide.
And health providers may also be influenced by financial considerations to encourage assisted dying, say critics who have highlighted cases in which hospitals and care homes have – like the Stegemann case – been accused of being overly enthusiastic about pushing those in their care towards MAiD.
Canada’s healthcare spending – which is entirely state-funded – is the second-highest in the developed world. Opponents of assisted dying argue that encouraging patients who need extended and expensive care and treatment know it can be an effective way of cutting costs.
Certainly, cases are stacking up in which the friends and family of MAiD patients have claimed that the decision to go with assisted dying was railroaded through by doctors, nurses and MAiD practitioners with little discussion or consideration of alternatives.
Earlier this month, Canadian sisters Alicia and Christie Duncan told Our News Outlet that in October 2021 they were given just 48 hours notice that their mother was being euthanized.
They insisted that their mother, Donna, was not terminally ill but the victim of a spiraling mental health crisis, triggered by a car accident and exacerbated by the isolation of the pandemic.
Canadian sisters Alicia and Christie Duncan told Our News Outlet that in October 2021 they were given just 48 hours notice that their mother was being euthanized
They insisted that their mother, Donna, was not terminally ill but the victim of a spiraling mental health crisis
The retired psychiatric nurse started behaving oddly, too paranoid to leave her home in case she was shot by a sniper and was paying $6,000 to a ‘medical’ psychic to tell her if there were heavy metals in her food. MAiD practitioners determined she was on a ‘foreseeable trajectory’ towards death due to malnutrition.
The daughters delayed Donna’s MAiD death appointment by going to the police and persuading a judge to grant officers a last-minute arrest warrant under the Mental Health Act.
Donna was transferred to a psychiatric ward but, tragically, it proved only a temporary reprieve. She was discharged from the ward without her daughters’ knowledge and died by MAiD lethal injection a few days later.
That same year, Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Office published a report estimating that nearly $87 million was saved through the MAiD system, as an alternative to palliative care.
‘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,’ said Alicia.
Now a campaigner for stricter euthanasia rules, she blamed her mother’s death on legislation riven with dangerous loopholes which have resulted MAiD approvals for non-terminal conditions such as hearing loss, Type 2 diabetes, and straightforward physical frailty.
Alicia presented evidence to the UK parliament last year in the lead-up to a 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. The proposal to legalize assisted dying in the UK was defeated in a House of Commons vote.
In March this year, Canadian Miriam Lancaster, 84, revealed her shock that doctors at Vancouver General Hospital in British Columbia mentioned euthanasia when she went to its Emergency Room about back pain.
‘I was approached by a young lady doctor whose very first words out of her mouth is we would like to offer you [euthanasia],’ the retired piano teacher said in a video posted on social media platform X.
‘That was the last thing on my mind,’ Lancaster added. ‘I did not want to die.’
She told the National Post: ‘A patient is already upset and disoriented and wishing they weren’t there. To give them a decision, a life-terminating decision, when they are in this condition, that’s what I object to.’
Her medical issues were simply a ‘matter of pain management,’ she said. ‘Just because someone is 84 does not mean they’re ready to go on the scrap heap of life.’
Vancouver Coastal Health, which oversees the hospital in question, said that ‘staff may consider bringing up MAiD based on their clinical judgement, provided they possess the necessary knowledge and skills to do so.’
The hospital added that emergency department staff were ‘not generally in a position to raise the topic of MAiD with patients.’
However, that has hardly been the only case of medical staff raising MAiD as an option when it was entirely inappropriate.
In December 2025, a 26-year-old diabetic and blind Ontario man, Kiano Vafaeian, died through the MAiD program – three years after his mother had managed to stop a previous suicide attempt. Margaret Marsilla insisted her son, who suffered from depression, had never been terminally ill and condemned his physician-assisted death as ‘disgusting on every level.’
‘And I promise I will fight tooth and nail for my son and other parents who too have children that suffer from mental illness,’ she said. ‘No parent should ever have to bury their child because a system – and a doctor – chose death over care, help or love.’
Concerns about MAiD have been growing for years with little sign that Canada’s leaders are listening.
Canadian Miriam Lancaster, 84, revealed her shock that doctors in British Columbia mentioned euthanasia when she went to its Emergency Room about back pain
‘That was the last thing on my mind,’ Lancaster said. ‘I did not want to die’
Kiano Vafaeian, a 26-year-old diabetic and blind Ontario man, died through the MAiD program – three years after his mother had managed to stop a previous suicide attempt
As long ago as 2021, three United Nations experts concluded the MAiD law appeared to violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The following year, Christine Gauthier, a paraplegic army veteran who competed in the 2016 Paralympics, told Canadian MPs how, after five years of trying to obtain a stairlift for her home, a Veterans Affairs official told her that if she was ‘desperate,’ they could offer her MAiD.
Justin Trudeau, Canada’s then prime minister, admitted what happened was ‘absolutely unacceptable,’ even as it emerged that at least another half-dozen veterans were told the same.
Roger Foley, who suffered from a degenerative brain disorder, secretly recorded staff at his hospital in London, Ontario, mentioning euthanasia unprompted.
In one recording, the hospital’s director of ethics told Foley it would cost ‘north of $1,500 a day’ to keep him in hospital, then asked ‘if you had an interest in assisted dying.’ The hospital said its staff was entitled to discuss MAiD without a patient having raised it.
Alan Nichols, a 61-year-old British Columbian, was hospitalized in 2019 over concerns he might be suicidal. Despite asking his brother, Gary, to ‘bust him out’ as soon as possible, within a month he’d submitted a MAiD request. He listed only one health condition, hearing loss, but it was enough and he was euthanized.
His family and a nurse practitioner made an official complaint, saying he had clearly not met the MAiD criteria because he lacked the capacity to understand the process and wasn’t suffering unbearably. ‘Alan was basically put to death,’ said brother Gary.
Rod McNeill, 71, went to an Ontario hospital after a fall. A month later, he had been euthanized. According to his daughter, Erin, the doctors responsible didn’t even retrieve his medical records and killed him, albeit with his consent, for end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease a condition that a postmortem showed he didn’t have.
According to her family, Nancy Russell, 90, persuaded doctors to let her be killed because she didn’t want to go through another Covid lockdown in her Toronto care home.
Almost half of all Canadians who have died by MAiD have seen themselves as a burden on relatives and friends. In 2024, a quadriplegic man, Norman Meunier, went into a Quebec hospital with a respiratory infection. Just four days later, he had still not been given a proper mattress and developed painful bedsores. He applied for MAiD, telling a radio station: ‘I don’t want to be a burden,’ a day before he was killed.
Most Canadian doctors refuse to euthanize people, leaving a small minority to take on the cases. Consequently, some have euthanized hundreds of people – or, as some of them call it, ‘delivered’ them from intolerable lives.
The word ‘euthanasia’ comes from the Ancient Greek for ‘good death.’ But if her granddaughter is to be believed, Brigitte Stegemann’s death was anything but ‘good’ and, in the hands of Canada’s bien pensant leaders, it has instead become a deeply divisive way of killing tens of thousands of their own citizens.
