Misinformation at Parliament: What Happened on October 28th
Veterans and people with mental illness deserve better advocacy
Part I — The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition at the Press Gallery
Part III — We Asked the Committee About Their Vetting Process
We’ve deliberately said very little about MAiD for mental illness until now. Quite honestly, there hasn’t been much to say with any certainty. Until we start to hear concrete plans from federal and provincial governments, most of the discussion remains speculative.
But speculation hasn’t stopped others from speaking with absolute certainty — most recently the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC) and Kelsi Sheren, both of whom appeared at Parliament on October 28th to support Bill C-218, which intends to permanently block people from requesting MAiD because of a mental illness. So consider this our first real entry into the topic.
Before we begin, it’s important to acknowledge that there are real, serious, good-faith concerns about allowing MAiD when mental illness is the sole underlying medical condition. People can worry about how some mental illness may impair capacity1, how to distinguish suicidal ideation from a considered request for MAiD, how to support individuals who haven’t had consistent access to mental-health care2, or how to determine if — or when — a mental illness can be considered incurable. These are legitimate concerns — ones we share — and they deserve careful, thoughtful consideration.
The events of Oct 28 included several serious and deeply problematic claims about MAiD and about mental illness. And because those claims were made in Parliament — at the Parliamentary Press Gallery and again before a Veterans Affairs Committee studying veteran suicide — they carry what we believe is an undeserved sense of legitimacy. That’s why they require a careful, factual, and thorough response.
Part I — The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition at the Press Gallery
EPC’s press conference was short, repetitive, and seemed to be built around one central thesis: people with mental illness are inherently incapable of making a competent decision about MAiD.
EPC’s Foundational Argument
Friesen begins by stating:
“That is what fuels support for MAiD, not that people believe that some patients should die, but that they might perhaps themselves make free, informed, competent, adult choices. Obviously, however, euthanasia for the mentally ill does not fit that description, for the symptoms of mental illness often make that sort of choice impossible.” - Gordon Friesen, at the 0:54 mark. Emphasis added.
Right out of the gate, he makes their core argument unmistakably clear. When he says that “euthanasia for the mentally ill does not fit that description,” he is, in plain terms, asserting that people who request MAiD for a mental illness are not capable of making a “free, informed, competent, adult” decision regarding . He tries to soften this by saying that mental illness often makes that sort of choice impossible, but his position seems clear: he seems to believe it is self-evident that people with mental illnesses cannot make these kinds of serious decisions.
This assertion is categorically false. Some mental illnesses can impair decision-making in certain circumstances, but it is simply untrue that they always do — or even often do. In reality, most people living with mental illness retain the ability to make serious and informed decisions about their lives, including end-of-life decisions, most of the time.
Furthermore, capacity is always presumed unless there is a clear reason to question it. When concerns do arise, capacity must be assessed individually and at a specific point in time, in relation to the specific decision being made. To suggest otherwise erodes the autonomy and agency that every capable person is entitled to — the very opposite of what Friesen is about to claim.
We reached out to the EPC before publishing to ask whether their position is truly that people with mental illness are categorically incapable of making MAiD decisions. They did not respond. If they wish to clarify their position, we will publish it here.
From Misunderstanding Consent to a Slippery Slope
After asserting that people with mental illness can never be capable, Friesen moves from misunderstanding capacity to building an entire slippery-slope argument on that faulty premise. At 3:20, he claims that allowing MAiD for adults with mental illness would lead to euthanizing children, infants, or incapable seniors. He says:
“The precedent of medical homicide for mental illness opens a critical gateway to other situations of questionable choice. Now, on the drawing board, for example, we find the projected euthanasia for children from 12 years onward and of infants up to 12 years in addition to demented seniors whose former selves made an advanced request.”3
Let that sink in. Friesen is arguing that allowing anyone with a mental illness to ever access MAiD — even a single person — is a “critical gateway” to a host of other “questionable choices”.4
He explicitly questioned the ability of all people with mental illness to make serious medical decisions — ever. Building on that, he argues that if people he argues lack capacity are permitted to request MAiD, it would completely erode the MAiD capacity and consent safeguards themselves. And once eroded, this would pave the way for MAiD for anyone deemed incapable — minors, infants, and people with dementia.
He is presenting difficult and complicated ethical situations stripped of context and nuance, knowing that doing so makes these situations sound far more alarming than they actually are5.
Unfortunately, his entire argument only works if you accept his starting assumption: that all people with mental illness are incapable from the outset. But once you reject that premise — as Canadian law and clinical practice do — his entire cascade falls apart. There is no pathway from recognizing the capacity of an individual with a mental illness to suddenly abandoning capacity and consent standards for everyone else.
To make his point perfectly clear, at 3:44 he adds:
“And behind these again, we have other cohorts of persons who no longer or have never been capable of consent. Any weakening of the competent choice requirement places all of these at deadly risk. The only way to prevent such appalling outcomes is to definitively close that pathway now.”
If there is an argument more detached from how medical capacity actually works, it’s hard to imagine what it would look like. This is not an ethical argument. It’s an argument rooted in a profound misunderstanding of capacity, consent, and the lived reality of people with mental illness. It misunderstands both the law and clinical practice, and it does so by portraying an entire population as inherently incapable, permanently vulnerable, and fundamentally untrustworthy in their own decision-making.
Quite frankly, it’s a bit embarrassing that this is the argument they’ve settled on. But when your starting point is that MAiD is never acceptable — and you know the vast majority of Canadians disagree with you — you have to reach for something. We’re just surprised they landed on an argument so riddled with ethical and logical errors.
Alex Schadenberg Repeats the Same Claim
When Friesen finishes, he hands the podium to Alex Schadenberg, the Executive Director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, who proceeds to repeat almost exactly the same claims. Clearly, this isn’t an off-the-cuff misunderstanding of capacity — this is their coordinated position; the argument they believe is coherent and persuasive. It isn’t.
At the 6:30 mark, Schadenberg says:
“But even off the very basic concept of MAiD for mental illness, that undermines the whole concept of whether someone can properly consent, whether they are truly consenting, whether they are of their right mind, whether there are alternatives for them.”
According to Schadenberg, simply recognizing the possibility of capacity in someone with a mental illness “undermines” the entire concept of consent itself. This is the same categorical denial of agency that Friesen laid out minutes earlier.
Then, at the 9:27 mark, he doubles down:
“I don’t believe you should allow MAiD for any conditions, but this is very particular [MAiD for mental illness]. It clearly undermines the concept of the freedom of choice, autonomy, and one’s ability to consent.”
There is no ambiguity here, and no originality either — Schadenberg is simply restating the same unfounded premise Friesen relied on. He declares that it “clearly undermines the concept of freedom of choice.” But it isn’t clear at all, and he offers no reasoning to show why that would be the case. It’s presented as self-evident, when in reality it’s nothing more than a bare assertion. And that pattern — confident claims in direct opposition to the evidence — leads straight into the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition’s credibility problem.
EPC’s Credibility Problem
Now, you might be wondering who Gordon Friesen and Alex Schadenberg are, and why we should be concerned with what they have to say. Many people in Canada may not have heard of them. But we still have to take their claims seriously — not because we think they are credible, but because they continue to be treated as if they are.
The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition has submitted testimony to multiple parliamentary committees studying MAiD, and was even consulted during the National Conversation on advance requests6 — a process meant for informed, trustworthy stakeholders. That alone gives their messaging a veneer of legitimacy. Whether they have earned it is another matter entirely, especially when their recent public statements have been so demonstrably wrong that it is hard to tell whether the issue is deliberate misrepresentation or a failure to understand the material.
A good example came as recently as Saturday, November 8 when the EPC published a blog post—written by Executive Director Alex Schadenberg—titled “Health Canada regulations require doctors to offer euthanasia.”7 This was based on Health Canada’s Model Practice Standard for Medical Assistance in Dying8, a document published in 2023.
For anyone familiar with how health governance works in Canada, this claim is laughably false. In Canada, practice standards for physicians are not dictated by Health Canada but by provincial and territorial regulatory colleges. The federal government’s role is limited to national policy, oversight of products (drugs/devices), interprovincial coordination and other system-wide issues — not directing the daily practice of individual clinicians.
On top of that, the very document EPC is misrepresenting is called a Model Practice Standard. A model — meaning a template, a reference, a resource that provincial regulators may choose to adopt or adapt if they find it useful. It is not binding, not mandatory, and not regulatory.
The task group that produced this document could not have been clearer when they explicitly stated:
“The Task Group hopes that physician and nurse regulators will adopt or adapt the content of the documents in their development or ongoing revision of MAID standards.”
And even more plainly:
“The documents themselves are neither authoritative nor binding.”
If Schadenberg actually read and understood the documents, he would have found them unmistakably clear: the model practice standard guides physicians and nurse practitioners to use their professional judgment to determine if raising MAiD is appropriate and ethical, based on the person’s medical situation, the likelihood they would meet eligibility criteria, and — most importantly — whether MAiD aligns with the person’s expressed goals and values.
In fact, the document explicitly states that:
“If a practitioner is aware that MAID is not consistent with a patient’s values and goals of care, they should not initiate a discussion about MAID.”9
The exact opposite of what Schadenberg is claiming.
So whether Schadenberg (1) didn’t read the Model Practice Standards, (2) read them but didn’t understand them, or (3) read and understood them, but choose to misrepresent them anyway, the conclusion we draw is the same: he — and by extension the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition — lacks credibility.10
When an organization that testifies before parliamentary committees cannot accurately interpret a publicly available document written in plain language, it raises serious questions about the reliability of everything else they claim.
And that concern only grows when you look at the rest of the press conference. After Schadenberg and Friesen finished, Kelsi Sheren stepped in — and her contribution followed the same pattern: sweeping claims presented with absolute certainty, but untethered from the facts. Her testimony later that day at the Veterans Affairs Committee made that pattern even clearer.
Part II — Kelsi Sheren
Before addressing Sheren’s statements at the press conference and at the Committee on Veteran Affairs, it’s important to recognize that she raises real, serious issues. Veterans’ access to mental-health support is inadequate. The fact that any VA caseworker ever raised MAiD is unacceptable. And access to treatments like psilocybin and MDMA through the Special Access Program (SAP)11 is far too difficult.
These are legitimate concerns.
The problem is that Sheren mixes legitimate issues with sweeping claims that are exaggerated, unsupported, false, and in one instance, harmful to the very people she purports to advocate for.
And this isn’t exactly a secret outside of her own circle. Her misinformation has been repeatedly flagged by journalists, fact-checkers, and us — a point that became impossible to ignore earlier this month when a number of reputable organizations independently published fact-checks addressing false claims she has been spreading about MAiD.
Kelsi Sheren’s Very Bad Week
Here’s what Sheren’s week looked like:
Nov. 10 — Impact Ethics identifies Sheren as “well recognized as being one of the most vocal sources of misinformation [about] MAiD in Canada”.
Nov. 12 — AFP Fact Check explains how she misrepresents MAiD “cost-saving” research as a plan by Health Canada to save $1.7 trillion by killing 14.7 million Canadian — none of which is true.
Nov. 14 — The Canadian Press published a national fact-check quoting Health Canada, who labeled Kelsi’s social media claims as “false” and “disinformation”.
When Health Canada labels a claim as ‘disinformation,’ it means the claim is false and has been circulated willfully and despite clear evidence to the contrary. Health Canada and major news outlets have publicly stated that several of Sheren’s MAiD-related claims fall into that category. These repeated corrections highlight an ongoing issue with the accuracy of the information she shares about MAiD.
Sheren’s Claims at the Parliamentary Press Gallery
We’re only going to touch briefly on Sheren’s remarks at the Press Gallery. In the context of her broader public statements, this appearance was actually quite tame. And genuinely — credit where it’s due — the level of misinformation was noticeably lower than what she has shared elsewhere. But ‘less’ is not the same as ‘none.’
It’s also important to acknowledge again that some of what she raised reflects very real problems in our healthcare system, particularly around the care and support available to veterans. Those issues deserve serious attention. The challenge is that she blends legitimate concerns with claims that are exaggerated or unsupported, which makes it harder — not easier — to address the actual failures veterans face.
Sheren begins with:
Behind closed doors, in quiet conversations, veterans are being offered medical assistance in dying. Not therapy, not recovery, not support, not help, but death.” [10:57]
This is an exaggeration. The inappropriate mentions of MAiD at Veterans Affairs were real — but they were isolated incidents that have been addressed.12 To claim that “death” is the only thing on offer is simply not true. It weakens her argument and distracts from the actual problem: even one inappropriate mention of MAiD is one too many.
She then makes sweeping assertions about people being told to “give up and die” after breakups, grief, or poverty — none of which are supported by any evidence — and repeats the thoroughly debunked narrative that MAiD is being offered as a cost-saving measure because it is too expensive to treat people. (12:20)
Sheren then raises a point that is legitimate, important, and worth public attention. For a brief moment, she identifies a real issue affecting veterans — one that genuinely deserves serious discussion. But almost immediately, she undermines that valid concern by attaching it to a claim that is not only untrue but harmful to the very people she says she wants to support.
The Psilocybin Claim: False — and Repeated Twice
This is where the inaccuracies becomes clearest. Sheren begins by talking about the difficulty of accessing psychedelic-assisted therapy through Health Canada’s Special Access Program. She has raised this issue before — including the fact that the therapy component is unfunded, and that gaining approval through the program can be slow and difficult.13 All of that is true. The barriers are real, and they meaningfully limit access for people who may benefit from psychedelic-assisted therapy.
But she then claims that she is “the only recipient in Canadian medical history to have access to regulated psilocybin outside of a clinical trial”.14 (13:10)
The moment Sheren made this claim, our misinformation alarms lit up. It simply did not sound plausible that she was the “only recipient” ever granted psilocybin through this program. To understand why, a quick detour into the Special Access Program (SAP) was necessary.15
The SAP allows physicians to request legal access to substances not yet approved for general use — including psilocybin and MDMA — for patients who have not improved with conventional treatments. This program has existed since 2022, and its entire purpose is to give people precisely the kind of access Sheren describes.
To verify, we contacted Health Canada and the Special Access Program directly, asking if it were true that only one person has ever been granted access to psilocybin. Their response was unambiguous:
“Since 2022, we have received hundreds of requests and issued hundreds of authorizations for hundreds of patients.”
We wanted more precise numbers, so we made a freedom of information request:16 From January 1, 2022 to June 26, 2025, Health Canada authorized 299 requests for psilocybin under the Special Access Program, along with an additional 70 authorizations for MDMA. Given these numbers, it is not clear why Sheren believes she is “the only recipient in Canadian medical history to have access to regulated psilocybin outside of a clinical trials”. Based on Health Canada’s data, that statement is plainly incorrect.
We contacted Sheren to point out that her statement was not accurate and invited her to correct the record, noting that we would report any correction she provided. She did not reply.
The Harm
Setting aside the question of why she made this claim, it was completely unnecessary to her point. Whether the true number of approvals was 1, 100, or 500 over the past three and a half years, the underlying issue remains the same: access to psilocybin-assisted therapy through the Special Access Program is extremely limited, and many more people could benefit from it. Her argument would have been just as strong — arguably stronger — had she cited the accurate numbers.
By stating instead that she is the only person ever approved, a claim that is demonstrably false and one she later repeated before the Veterans Affairs Committee that same day, she ends up undermining her own credibility. More importantly, this kind of framing misleads those wanting to apply into believing that access is next to impossible, which is not the case. That misunderstanding doesn’t help the people she says she wants to support — it harms them.
Imagine a veteran living with a serious mental illness, already struggling to access care. Imagine them having a physician preparing an SAP request on their behalf — or considering whether to ask for one — only for them to hear Sheren tell the country that in nearly four years, only one person has ever been approved. What conclusion would they draw? Probably that there’s no point even trying. That the system is so impenetrable, it isn’t worth the effort. That’s harmful.
Yes, access to psilocybin and MDMA through the SAP is still far too difficult. That’s a real and legitimate issue. Yes, the therapy component should have funding attached. But telling people the system is impossible to navigate — especially when that claim is untrue — only pushes them further away from a treatment that might help. It undermines her message, erodes her credibility, and ultimately harms the very veterans she’s trying to support.
Testimony Before the Veterans Affairs Committee
Sheren’s appearance before the Veterans Affairs Committee later that same day followed the same pattern — mixing legitimate concerns with claims that were exaggerated, unsupported, or simply false.
https://www.ourcommons.ca/committees/en/ACVA/StudyActivity?studyActivityId=13126905
Repeating Debunked Claims About MAiD Medications
Sheren reiterates claims she has made for more than a year:17
“See, you don’t really need to offer [veterans] a needle, a paralytic, or a drug that fills their lungs as they drown to death in their own fluids.”
Sheren has been told repeatedly that none of this is true, but she continues to assert that MAiD causes the lungs to fill with fluid and that people “drown.”
She also continues to suggest that a paralytic is given first18, which is typically followed by the claim that people receiving MAiD would be screaming in agony if they could only move. Also false. She has made these statements over and over again despite being corrected publicly, repeatedly, and with abundant clarity.19
But in her testimony — in Parliament — she presents them again as fact.
A brief aside: we’ve recently commented on some of Sheren’s YouTube videos. When she claimed that a paralytic is administered first and raised concerns that Canada uses medications for MAiD that are not FDA-approved, we pointed out three basic facts. First, the FDA does not approve medications for use in Canada — Health Canada does. Second, medications are used off-label every day in clinical practice, in both countries, without issue. Third, the paralytic she references — rocuronium — is not given first; it is given last, after the person has been placed into a deep medically-induced coma. She didn’t address any of this directly. Instead, on a recent podcast, she called her critics “clowns” and says to “call the NIH” suggesting it proves her claims. She even went as far as saying those who question her are “so dumb you can’t read it yourself”.
For clarity: both the FDA and the NIH are American institutions. They have no regulatory authority in Canada, including over MAiD medications or protocols. This is all just to illustrate how challenging it is to correct these claims when the misunderstandings begin with the most basic facts about which agencies operate in which country.
Repeating the Psilocybin Claim Again
During the same appearance, she again states she is the only person in Canadian history to receive psilocybin through the SAP.
Part III — We Asked the Committee About Their Vetting Process
Because of all of this — the misinformation, the repetition, and the lack of correction even when factual errors were pointed out — we reached out to Marie-France Lalonde, the Committee Chair, to ask about how witnesses are chosen. We expressed concerns and asked four specific questions:
What safeguards exist to prevent witnesses from using committee testimony to advance personal agendas based on false or misleading claims?
What vetting process is applied to ensure witnesses present evidence-based information?
Are there mechanisms to correct the public record when testimony contains demonstrable factual errors?
The response was not reassuring.
We were told that committee members — they did not say which — may invite whomever they wish, and there is no formal vetting process to review a witness’s prior statements or ensure they are credible witnesses.
We asked whether accuracy is expected of witnesses. The response emphasized parliamentary privilege — meaning witnesses can say virtually anything they want without fear of reprisal.
There is no mechanism to correct the public record.
Sheren’s Prior Statements About Suicide
Were committee members aware of Sheren’s past statements — what she has said publicly, what she would say during this meeting, and what she might say if she is invited back? If they weren’t, they should be. When past statements are directly relevant to the topic under study, and when they are as serious as some of Sheren’s, they should factor into decisions about who is invited to testify, and whether they are invited again.
In this case — a committee meeting examining veteran suicide — two of Sheren’s very public statements immediately stood out:
A statement Sheren made on the Triggernometry podcast. YouTube - Jan 15 2025
A more recent comment on the Jillian Michaels podcast YouTube - Oct 29 2025
Given these remarks, we wonder if Sheren has considered that many veterans live with serious illnesses such as cancer, and some may wish to exercise their legal right to request MAiD. Would her advice to them be consistent with what she expressed on those podcasts?
We also wonder — given these statements — if Sheren should be allowed to testify about veteran suicide ever again.
As we said at the very beginning, veterans deserve better advocacy than this.
Not all mental illnesses affect a person’s ability to give informed consent — and even when they do, the impact isn’t constant. It depends heavily on the type of illness and the phase someone is in. During a crisis or an acute episode, a mental illness is more likely to impair capacity. But in a stable phase, there may be no impact on capacity at all.
A lack of consistent access to mental-health care over time will make it extremely difficult to determine whether a mental illness meets the incurability criterion. Without a substantial history of treatment and supports—likely measured in long years or even decades—an assessor will have difficulty coming to the conclusion that all reasonable interventions have been tried.
We wonder if he is aware that people with mental illnesses can currently have MAiD, when they also have a serious and incurable medical condition like cancer. We assume he also thinks these folks should also be excluded from accessing MAiD because of their mental illness.
Model Practice Standard for Medical Assistance in Canada (MAiD) - Health Canada
There are many more examples of this type of misrepresentation of facts—in his blog, and in public statements.
Sheren made this statement in the context of talking about the Special Access Program. Access to psilocybin through clinical trials is managed through an entirely different department. It is unclear why Sheren made that distinction.
To Sheren’s credit, she has begun getting the order of MAiD medications right, in some instances. Midazolam, propofol, then rocuronium, the paralytic. However, even when getting the medications order right, she still asserts that people are being paralyzed and would scream if they could. This is physiologically impossible.
I've had discussions with people that claim they are for MAiD for the terminally ill (track 1) and those suffering physically (track 2), but not for mental disorders.
My strategy to make them think about it is simple: I start asking them where the line is. And I start describing conversion disorder. Severe and constant pain and migraines. Spasms of the eyelids that leaves you effectively blind. Digestive problems that stops you from eating for up to 2 days at a time. Muscle wasting.
People that claim to support track 1 AND track 2, but not MD-SUMC typically answer yes, those should be allowed. I then show them them Canada v E.F, and how the government tried to stop her from receiving MAiD because her illness was psychiatric in nature.
Sometimes it doesn't move their opinion. Sometimes it moves their opinion to "Psychiatric illnesses with symptoms of severe physical conditions", but I've yet to convince somebody that psychiatric/mental illnesses as the sole underlying condition should be approved.
Because people still see "mental illness" and think "depression" or "feeling a bit sad" at best, or "lack of mental capacity" at worst.
Thanks for this. I am 65, have suffered from mental health issues all of my life. I have had fantastic psychiatric and therapist care for decades, especially the last 10, when I moved to an area where therapy is free. My life is empty, lonely, and mostly very painful. I have lost all friends, my kids have either shunned me or are too busy, my reason for living the past 4 years, my little grandson, was just ripped from me. I want to end my life but have been unsuccessful with suicide attempts. All treatments and therapies have been exhausted. Why do I not have the right to have my life ended peacefully?