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.
Denial rate much higher
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.
Manitoba an anomaly
However, it wasn’t just one year, and it is unclear why.
Shared Health statistics showed the MAID eligibility rate dropped to 26 per cent in 2025, still more than four times the previous year’s national average.
Manitoba is the only province to have fewer MAID provisions in 2024 (186) than 2021 (245).
According to annual federal reports, Manitoba had fewer MAID deaths than the smaller provinces of Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick dating back to 2022, a year when Manitoba was the only province to have its share of total MAID deaths compared with total deaths drop (1.8 per cent).
The rest of the country has seen increasing MAID applications and approvals since people with chronic conditions such as Penner’s were allowed in 2021 to apply under what is called Track 2.
The law
The law says to be approved for MAID, patients must:
- Have a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability (excluding a mental illness until March 17, 2027).
- Be in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability.
- Have enduring and intolerable physical or psychological suffering that cannot be alleviated under conditions the person considers acceptable.
Before that, death had to be “reasonably foreseeable.”
Now, the two practitioners who assess each Track 2 application must either have expertise in the medical condition that is causing the person’s suffering, or consult with a practitioner who does.
Unless someone is about to lose their capacity to make their own health-care decisions, Penner’s timeframe of about a month would be too quick of a decision for a Track 2 patient.
“The law requires a minimum of 90 days to kind of allow for the kind of work that needs to be done,” said Stefanie Green, a doctor with the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers.
Family frustrated
Penner’s daughter, Valerie Penner, says she’s felt frustration at the process since she rushed to her mother’s bedside in December from her home in Minnesota.
She thought she and other family members had gathered to say goodbye when the doctors told her that they did not think her mother would survive her broken pelvis much longer.
She does not want her mother to be sent to palliative care outside of Steinbach, the only home she’s ever known.
“Especially now being palliative — that she’s going to die in the next while — it feels like the system just wants to warehouse you until you do so you don’t have to really touch or affect MAID numbers,” Valerie Penner said.
Penner is considering asking for a second opinion.
She would need Shared Health to help her find two more doctors or nurse practitioner MAID assessors out of the 20 in the province, three of whom are in rural areas.
Waiting for fate
While Penner waits to hear whether she might be sent to another community for palliative care, she reminisces about playing piano for other seniors in days past, sometimes getting the party started with an Elvis cover.
She also has time to brag about her late husband George Penner, a former Steinbach councillor and developer responsible for a big portion of the city’s growth.
When asked how she would like to be remembered, Penner said others have more eloquent words, but hers are simple: “She did her best.”
