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Canada euthanized Donna Duncan hours after a psychiatric unit released her

Canada Euthanized Donna Duncan Hours After a Psychiatric Unit Released Her. Her Family Still Can’t See Why

by
M.A. Rothman

By M.A. RothmanOctober 2, 2026 · 4 min read
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Donna Duncan was a retired psychiatric nurse in Abbotsford, British Columbia, when she died by medical assistance in dying on Oct. 29, 2021. According to her family, she was euthanized at home roughly four hours after she was released from an involuntary psychiatric hold, days after a suicide attempt. Nearly five years later, her daughter is still fighting to find out how that was allowed to happen.

Alicia Duncan has told her mother’s story in a new book, The Other Side of the Straitjacket, and in a September 2026 interview with The Epoch Times. Her verdict is simple. “My mom was not dying,” she said. “She was in crisis.”

From a car accident to a death approval

Donna Duncan was 61. She was a two-time cancer survivor, according to The Catholic Register, and by her daughter’s account a quirky, relentlessly positive woman. In February 2020, she was in a car accident and suffered a concussion.

What followed, her family says, was a steep decline. She developed anxiety, paranoia and an aversion to food, along with heightened sensitivity to touch, sight and smell and pain when eating. She became significantly underweight.

On Oct. 14, 2021, she asked her doctor for a MAID assessment. According to The Epoch Times, he declined, saying she had not followed his treatment recommendations and that he believed her physical condition was closely tied to her worsening mental health. She went elsewhere. Within about two weeks she had approvals from two independent assessors, who found that her weight loss and frailty made her natural death “reasonably foreseeable,” the legal threshold that puts a patient on Canada’s fastest track to assisted death. Her family disputes that finding.

Four hours

When Alicia and her sister Christie learned of the approval, they went to court. A British Columbia provincial judge issued a warrant under the Mental Health Act for their mother to be apprehended and assessed further, postponing the MAID appointment.

In the days that followed, Donna attempted suicide. She survived and was admitted involuntarily to the same psychiatric unit she had once managed. Her daughters could keep her there for only 72 hours, according to The Catholic Register. She was released on Oct. 29, 2021. That same day, by the family’s account less than four hours later, she received MAID at home.

“She had just attempted suicide, yet days later that same wish to die was treated as an autonomous medical decision,” Alicia told The Epoch Times.

The records no one will release

The family asked the Abbotsford Police Department to investigate, in what The Catholic Register described as the first police investigation of a MAID death in Canada. Fraser Health, the regional health authority, refused to give police Donna’s assessment records, saying the province’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner had to approve their release. After about 18 months, the commissioner’s office upheld Fraser Health’s denial.

The Abbotsford Police Department’s Major Crime Unit reviewed the case and, in 2022, concluded that no criminal offence had occurred and closed the file, according to The Epoch Times.

The family says it has never seen the underlying assessments, and so cannot know whether every legal safeguard was followed. “When investigations cannot be completed properly because authorities are refusing to release information, that’s a cover-up,” Alicia told The Catholic Register.

Former Conservative MP Ed Fast, who represented Abbotsford, raised the case in the House of Commons in October 2023 and again in February 2024.

A system that checks itself after the fact

Alicia’s central complaint is not only about her mother. It is about how Canada’s system is built. “The safeguards existed on paper, but no one was independently checking whether they had actually been met,” she said. “The public assumes someone is independently checking these decisions. They aren’t.” As she put it, “MAID assessments are completed by the practitioners involved, and oversight largely takes place after the person is dead.”

The law gives her reason to worry. Under the 2021 amendments, patients whose natural death is considered reasonably foreseeable need assessments from “two independent doctors or nurse practitioners,” but, according to the federal Justice Department, “the requirement for a minimum 10-day reflection period is now removed.” Patients whose death is not reasonably foreseeable face assessments that “must take at least 90 days.” Which track a patient lands on can decide whether there is time for anyone, family, doctor or court, to intervene. In Donna’s case, assessors put a woman with a psychiatric history and an eating aversion on the fast track because of her weight.

The scale is not small. Health Canada reports that MAID was provided to 16,499 people in 2024, or “5.1% of people in Canada who died.”

And Ottawa is not finished expanding it. Eligibility for people whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness has been postponed under Bill C-62, but only until March 17, 2027. Health Canada said in a Sept. 25 statement that such a person “is not currently eligible.” Donna Duncan was not approved for mental illness alone. Her family’s point is that she did not have to be: a crisis was folded into a physical diagnosis, and the system moved faster than her daughters could.

What her family wants

Alicia is calling for independent review of disputed cases and for safeguards that stop approvals for people in psychiatric crisis. Those are not radical demands. They are the minimum any country should require before a state-licensed clinician ends a life.

Canada had a suicidal woman in a locked psychiatric unit, let her go, and ended her life the same day, and it still won’t show her family the paperwork.

Editor’s note: This article covers the October 2021 death of Donna Duncan, which drew renewed attention in September 2026 following the publication of her daughter’s book and new interviews.

Sources

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