Manitobans denied assisted dying at 5 times national average, federal report shows

Marion Penner wants to die.

"You spend your days sitting in bed doing nothing, wondering why am I still here," said Penner, who spent her 94th birthday in Steinbach's Bethesda Regional Health Centre after a fall at home in December broke her pelvis.

Penner, who also suffers from chronic heart and kidney diseases, has been bedridden there since.

"What's the point, just to exist because of painkillers?" said Penner, with photographs of captured family memories lining the windowsill of her hospital room.

So, she applied for medically assisted dying (MAID).

In a letter sent to Shared Health, Steinbach doctor Monty Singh said he felt her conditions were incurable and serious, both necessary to qualify for MAID.

However, Penner says, she was quickly informed by doctors at BRHC in person, and over the phone by a nurse at Shared Health, that she did not qualify because she was too healthy.

She’s not alone. 

Manitobans are far more likely to be denied MAID eligibility than anywhere else in Canada.

The province's 32 per cent denial rate in 2024 was more than five times the national average of six per cent, according to the annual federal report on MAID published in November.

That average does not include the territories, P.E.I., New Brunswick or Nova Scotia because their small numbers were withheld due to privacy concerns.

Manitoba's MAID assessors rejected 175 applications of 548 in 2024, only three fewer than in Ontario, a province more than 10 times its size, where 6,000 applications were made.

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara's office suggested in an email that the 2024 numbers could be an anomaly. 

"In smaller provinces like Manitoba, even a small, one-time variation in the annual number of requests deemed ineligible can appear larger when expressed as a percentage," a spokesperson for Asagwara said.