When the 83-year-old woman her family called “GG” was first asked about Medical Assistance in Dying, her granddaughter was in the room. The offer was declined then and there, according to reporting by the American Thinker, and the reason given was religious faith. Weeks earlier, she had been diagnosed with terminal stage-four stomach cancer.
Two months later, with her granddaughter and medical advocate away on a scheduled vacation, the conversation was reopened — this time, per the outlet’s account, with no family present. Staff at the Belleville, Ontario nursing home where she lived determined that Brigitte Stegemann was capable of consenting and that she had consented. A date was set. The application was completed by the home’s administrator and witnessed by a single staff member. No family member signed, because no family member was told.
What happened next has become the focal point of a criminal investigation and the latest flashpoint in a long-running debate about where Canada’s assisted dying regime is heading.
The Case at the Center of It
The source of the most detailed public account is a Substack piece by Kelsi Sheren titled “The Last Ten Days of Brigitte ‘GG’ Stegemann,” which drew on extensive interviews with the granddaughter, Brigitte Kranendonk. Kranendonk had served as her grandmother’s medical advocate for twelve years and held Power of Attorney. She had also, according to the reporting, been the one person capable of communicating clearly with GG despite the older woman being deaf in one ear, partially deaf in the other, and experiencing cognitive decline — even through a medical mask. For the two years GG lived at the home, staff reportedly consulted her granddaughter on all matters of care.
In the Sheren interview, Kranendonk recalled a conversation with her grandmother just before the scheduled procedure. GG, she said, told her: “I’m gonna die on Friday.” Kranendonk answered that yes, the medical team was going to kill her on Friday. According to Kranendonk’s recollection, her grandmother wept for roughly forty-five minutes and repeated that she had made a mistake. Kranendonk comforted her and told her the truth as she understood the law to be: if she had changed her mind, she had the absolute right to tell the medical team on the day of the procedure that she did not want to go forward.
On the scheduled day, family members arrived in the morning and took GG outside to sit in the sun on the patio. Staff, per the account, tried to hurry them along. The family resisted. When GG was finally wheeled into the procedure room, things went wrong almost immediately. The nurse assigned to insert the IV needle reportedly struggled so badly that by the time the needle was in, GG and her bedclothes were covered in blood. When the doctor arrived to administer the lethal injection, she told GG she was giving her medicine to help her sleep peacefully. Kranendonk expected the doctor to ask for a final confirmation of consent. That did not happen, she says. The injection proceeded anyway. GG died soon after, her clothes bloodied, her hands folded in prayer.
What the Law Says, and What It Requires
Under Canada’s Criminal Code, the patient is supposed to initiate the formalities leading up to MAID. Unless a waiver has been signed earlier, two separate assessments of the patient’s capacity to consent must come back positive before an application can be made, witnessed, and a date set. The ability to withdraw consent at the last moment is central to the law and is frequently described by advocates as an ironclad safeguard.
In GG’s case, the application was reportedly made only after a date had already been set and while her advocate, who held Power of Attorney, was out of town. The original Criminal Code requirement of two witnesses to the application was amended at some earlier point to require only one — a detail the American Thinker singles out as an illustration of how far the safeguards have drifted from their original design.
Supporters of assisted dying generally argue that the safeguards written into law are robust, that the process is voluntary at every stage, and that individual failures by medical staff are precisely what the oversight system is designed to catch. If that system failed here, the outlet argues, it did so in ways that the law may not be equipped to remedy — particularly when the law, as written, grants broad discretion to medical personnel and leaves families with limited standing.
“Whatever a system may look like on paper, everything depends on the people who implement it,” the piece argues, adding that once an institution adopts the mindset captured by the saying “to a hammer everything looks like a nail,” system failure becomes inevitable. Whether the nursing home adhered to the letter of the law — one that, in the outlet’s framing, generously favors medical personnel over family — remains unresolved. Whether it honored the law’s spirit is a separate question entirely.
A Contrast With the American Model
The American Thinker draws a deliberate contrast with the thirteen U.S. states plus the District of Columbia where assisted suicide is legal. There, the outlet notes, the protocols are considerably stricter: a patient must make two explicit oral requests separated by a mandatory waiting period, plus one written request. A physician’s role is limited to prescribing the lethal medication; the patient must physically ingest it themselves. If a patient has lost the ability to swallow, no doctor may administer the drug on their behalf. And in the United States, a person cannot request assisted suicide in advance or write it into a living will.
The piece acknowledges that Canada was not the first country to legalize assisted suicide but argues it has become “the poster child for what the slippery slope looks like.” The familiar warning — that even tight initial restrictions will loosen over time — is at the heart of the argument. And in GG’s case, that warning, in the outlet’s telling, is no longer hypothetical. It is the subject of a criminal investigation.
The investigation’s outcome is not yet known. Nor is it clear what consequence, if any, the case will have for how Canada’s MAID regime is administered or amended. But the specifics — a deaf and cognitively declining patient, a single staff witness on an application, an absent family advocate, and a lethal injection delivered without a final verbal confirmation — have made the case a rallying point for critics who have long argued that the system’s safeguards are weaker than they appear on paper.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/assisted-suicide-in-canada-beware-the-slippery-slope/