This article was published by Kelsi Sheren on her substack on April 27, 2026.

April, in front of Canada’s Special Joint Parliamentary Committee on MAiD, a psychiatrist said the quiet part out loud.

Dr. Mona Gupta former chair of the federal Expert Panel on MAiD and Mental Illness testified before the committee between March 25 and April 2026. When Conservative MP Andrew Lawton asked directly whether depression or eating disorders could qualify someone for assisted death, she replied: “It depends on the circumstances of the person.” That’s it, that’s the answer.

Not a no, not a “those conditions fall outside the eligibility framework.” Just it depends. Let me tell you what that answer means in practice, i means the most common mental health diagnoses in this country the ones your kids have, your coworkers have, the ones millions of Canadians are managing right now are being actively contemplated as qualifying conditions for state-assisted death and the federal government’s own hand-picked expert couldn’t rule it out.

This wasn’t a fringe voice. This was the person Ottawa chose to lead the expert panel reviewing whether Canada is ready to expand MAiD to mental illness and her testimony was effectively yes, maybe.

The law currently excludes MAiD where mental illness is the sole underlying condition. But only until March 17, 2027. That date has already been pushed back twice…… Not because the government changed its mind but because it needed more time to get ready.

A committee of 10 MPs and five Senators is currently studying the question. The expansion has been delayed twice in the last three years..they’re not studying whether to do it, they’re studying how.

Here’s what the psychiatric community has actually said the people who treat these patients, not the people who administer death. The Canadian Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Mental Health Association, and the Society of Canadian Psychiatry have all said irremediability cannot be reliably predicted in psychiatric conditions. Eating disorders show long-term remission rates of 50 to 70 percent with appropriate care. Fifty to seventy percent with care.

We’re not offering that care. Wait times for psychiatric services in this country are unconscionable. Beds don’t exist. Therapists are inaccessible. The system is broken and underfunded and everyone knows it, but we’re preparing to offer assisted death to the people falling through its cracks.

Official 2024 figures show 16,499 MAiD provisions across Canada 5.1 percent of all deaths. Track 2 cases for people whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable numbered 732, a 17 percent increase from the previous year. 17 percent increase, in one year, for people who weren’t dying and now the next frontier is people who are depressed, and let’s be very uncomfortably honest here. Have you seen the state of Canada?! Of course young people are depressed!

I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it, this isn’t about autonomy. Autonomy requires real options. You can’t call it a free choice when someone is suffering, broke, on a waiting list, and the system hands them a pamphlet for death. That’s not autonomy. That’s a system that decided their life wasn’t worth the cost of fixing.

The parliamentary committee has been asked to complete additional review steps before the 2027 expansion proceeds, reflecting concern about safeguards and implementation readiness.

“Implementation readiness.” That’s the language. Not “is this the right thing to do.” Just are we ready to do it.

They’re not asking the right question and nobody in that committee room is being asked to answer for the people who will die because of their non-answer.

I’m asking. Because someone has to and there is a reason why people like me are not asked to testify on this committee and it’s because myself and others have healed from the same issues their trying to kill you for.