Canada permanently bars assisted dying for mentally ill patients after grandmother was 'euthanized against her will'

From the Newshound archive · first published 7 October 2026 · last updated 8 October 2026.

Canada's Justice Minister Sean Fraser has announced that people suffering exclusively from mental illness will be permanently excluded from accessing assisted death, abandoning an expansion that had already been postponed twice. A new bill, to be introduced this autumn, will enshrine the exclusion in law while also permitting patients with progressive incurable conditions to give advance consent to assisted dying before they lose capacity. The announcement came on the day the House of Commons was due to vote on a Conservative bill addressing the same issue.

The suspension follows the case of Ontario grandmother Brigitte Stegemann, 83, whose family say she was euthanized against her will after failing a consent test.

Psychiatry experts warned a parliamentary committee that doctors are wrong more than half the time when predicting whether a mental illness is incurable.

A federal court case challenging the government's earlier delay to mental-illness MAID remains live, meaning the Supreme Court could yet be drawn in.