Canada Kept Roger Foley in a Hospital for 10 Years. Then the Feeding Stopped.

Roger Foley has lived inside London Health Sciences Centre in London, Ontario, since February 2016. He is not there because doctors can cure him. He is there because, for nearly a decade, Ontario has refused to fund the self-directed home care that would let a disabled man live in his own community. Meanwhile, the one option the Canadian health system keeps putting on the table is the one he has never wanted: medical assistance in dying.

Foley, 49, has spinocerebellar ataxia type 14, a degenerative neurological disease that affects movement and coordination. He also has severe photosensitivity, which is why the latest chapter of his story is so disturbing.

The lights came out, and the feeding stopped

For years, Foley’s hospital room was fitted with specialized amber lighting that let him function, eat and take his medication. In early May 2025, staff took it out. In Foley’s own words, the hospital “abruptly and callously removed the specialized lighting accommodations that I had relied on for years,” accommodations he described as “medically necessary due to my severe neurological photosensitivity and visual disability.”

Once the lighting was gone, staff judged it unsafe to feed him by mouth without brighter light. Foley says he cannot tolerate that light. The result: according to reporting by the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition’s Alex Schadenberg, who visited him, Foley went five weeks without being fed as of June 12, 2025. He was kept going on IV fluids that supplied some nutrients, and at one point, Schadenberg reported, only water. Schadenberg’s point was blunt: Foley “is able to eat with assistance.”

Advocates report that he has not eaten solid or pureed food since early May 2025. He has filed a human rights complaint over the lighting removal. The hospital has not publicly confirmed the details of the feeding dispute.

“He is going to die”

His brother, Robert Foley, tried to get through to the hospital directly. In a June 4, 2025, email obtained by The Dallas Express, Robert warned staff that his brother was going to die and pleaded with them to restore the dimmer lighting Roger had used for years so he could eat, drink and take his medication. An official called his concerns “inappropriate and inflammatory” and told him to stop contacting the hospital.

Read that again. A family member begged a hospital to let his disabled brother eat, and the institution’s answer was to call him inflammatory.

The price tag Canada keeps reading him

Foley first made international headlines in 2018, when he released recordings of hospital staff discussing assisted death with him and reminding him what his care cost. According to National Post columnist Barbara Kay, staff told him he “costs Victoria Hospital more than $1,500 per day”, at least $548,000 a year.

That same year he sued, alleging he was being pressured toward assisted death while being denied the care he needed to live. The suit was struck, and Foley was ordered to pay legal costs. Kay reports that carers have continued to remind him that he has a “right” to euthanasia, which he has consistently refused. What he asks for instead is modest: self-directed home care, about 70 hours a week, so he can leave the hospital.

The hospital’s position, as reported, is that a hospital is not a long-term residence and that Foley should move to a long-term care facility, which he has resisted. Ontario’s home-care system does not routinely fund fully self-directed care at the level he is requesting.

Who is actually keeping him going

As of this summer, it is not the government. LifeSiteNews reported in July 2026 that a donor-funded personal support worker, hired through the volunteer group Life Care Network, visits up to three times a week for four or five hours at a stretch to help make sure he gets proper nutrition and his medications, which, according to lead advocate Lino DeFacendis, the hospital “does not always” provide. In June 2026, Foley and Life Care Network launched a fundraising campaign selling coffee, apparel and his own music to keep paying those caregivers.

Foley has described his fight this way: “Despite my condition, I have fought tirelessly for my rights, dignity, and the ability to return to the community.”

The bigger picture

Foley’s case is not an isolated glitch. Canada’s assisted-death program has grown at a staggering pace. Health Canada’s sixth annual report on MAID recorded 16,499 assisted deaths in 2024, about one in every twenty deaths in the country. Disability advocates have warned for years that when a state makes death free and fast but makes support scarce and slow, vulnerable people get steered toward the cheaper option.

Roger Foley is what that warning looks like in real life: a man who has said no for ten years, still waiting for a government that will pay strangers to end his life but not to help him live it.

Canada will hand a disabled man a death offer for free but won’t fund the care that keeps him alive, and Roger Foley is still refusing it.