Roger Foley has spent more than ten years in an Ontario hospital asking for the support necessary to live outside it. He has recorded hospital personnel raising assisted death, testified before Parliament that he felt coerced towards MAID, endured a later dispute which interrupted ordinary feeding, and now says privately funded carers must enter the public hospital to provide basic assistance. His case exposes the question at the heart of Canada’s euthanasia regime: what meaning has “autonomy” when assistance to die is guaranteed by law but assistance to live remains something a disabled man must fight to obtain?
Roger Foley is still alive. That fact deserves to stand at the beginning of his story, because for much of the past decade he has been obliged to insist upon something which ought never to have been controversial in a healthcare system: he wants help to live.
Foley has Spinocerebellar Ataxia Type 14, a progressive neurological disorder which has left him profoundly physically disabled and dependent upon others for most activities of daily living. He has been a patient at London Health Sciences Centre’s Victoria Hospital in Ontario since February 2016. His continued residence there is not because he regards an acute hospital ward as his home of choice. For years he has sought sufficiently flexible, self-directed home care which, he argues, would permit him to employ attendants capable of meeting his complex needs outside an institution.¹
That dispute over care would itself be troubling enough. What gives Foley’s case its wider significance is what happened while he was asking for assistance to live.
He began recording conversations with hospital personnel. In one recording subsequently obtained by the Associated Press, an ethicist discussed the cost of his remaining in hospital. When Foley challenged what he regarded as coercive pressure and asked about his future care, the ethicist explained: “My piece of this was to talk to you … if you had an interest in assisted dying.”²
Foley says he had not asked for euthanasia.
In November 2020 he appeared before the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. There was nothing ambiguous about his evidence. “I have been coerced into assisted death by abuse, neglect, lack of care and threats,” he told MPs. He alleged that assisted dying had been raised while he was fighting for self-directed care and complained that staff were presenting death rather than relieving the circumstances which made his life intolerable.³
These allegations require precision. A court has not held after trial that London Health Sciences Centre unlawfully coerced Foley towards euthanasia. Nor should the words “coercion” or “pressure” simply be treated as established judicial findings because Foley uses them. But neither may his account honestly be dismissed as an internet invention. His parliamentary evidence exists. The recordings exist. The Associated Press independently obtained one of them. The Canadian Parliament discussed his case. The Ontario Superior Court itself subsequently recorded the substance of his allegations while considering his litigation.⁴
Indeed, the 2023 judgment contains an important fact sometimes lost in polemical retellings of the case. The court observed that Foley was not then legally eligible for MAID and that the conduct he alleged against practitioners, if established as coercion, would itself have been contrary to Canadian law. The court did not decide that the conversations had been ethically proper. It ruled on whether the constitutional and civil causes of action pleaded before it could proceed in the forms alleged.⁴
That distinction matters because Foley’s lawsuit is also repeatedly misdescribed. In December 2023 the Ontario Superior Court struck extensive portions of his pleading, dismissing some claims and permitting specified claims against certain defendants to be amended. The remaining action was eventually dismissed in September 2024 after Foley failed to comply with orders requiring payment of more than C$100,000 in accumulated costs.⁵ That procedural history is significant, but it is not a judicial verdict that his recorded conversations never occurred or that every complaint about his treatment was false.
The case might nevertheless have faded into the archives of Canada’s MAID controversy had Foley’s difficulties simply ended there.
They did not.
In May 2025 another crisis developed around his care. Foley suffers what he describes as severe photosensitivity associated with his neurological condition. Specialised lower-intensity lighting had previously been used in his room. After changes to those arrangements, a dispute arose between Foley and hospital staff about the illumination necessary for carers safely to feed and assist him. Foley maintained that ordinary brighter lighting caused him significant symptoms; staff considered the darker conditions unsafe for aspects of care.⁶
The consequences were serious. The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, which has campaigned on Foley’s behalf, reported that by June 2025 he had gone approximately five weeks without ordinary oral feeding and was receiving intravenous fluids and limited nutritional support. Later arrangements permitted some liquid nutrition, with Foley using heavy protective goggles for short periods, but he continued to say that the lighting dispute prevented normal eating, medication and care.⁶
Accuracy is essential here. It would be wrong to say that Foley was simply deprived of every drop of water and every source of nutrition for five weeks. He received IV support. Nor does the evidence establish that hospital personnel deliberately withheld food in order to make him accept MAID. Those are stronger propositions than the available evidence supports.
The established chronology is disturbing enough.
A disabled man who had previously recorded assisted death being raised while he sought adequate care subsequently found himself in a prolonged dispute with the same hospital over disability accommodations necessary, he said, for ordinary feeding. The connection is not proof of a deliberate plan. It is a question about the environment in which “choice” is being discussed.
Foley’s brother Robert appealed directly to hospital personnel in June 2025. “My brother is going to die and I need you to stop that from happening,” he wrote. London Health Sciences Centre responded that his repeated emails were “inappropriate and inflammatory” but also stated that “the hospital and care team remain dedicated to addressing patient medical needs.” The hospital said those responsible for Foley’s care would communicate with him through the appropriate channels.⁷
That response belongs in the record. So does what followed.
By July 2026 the Life Care Network had launched a fundraiser to pay independent Personal Support Workers to assist Foley inside the hospital. According to Foley and the organisation, these privately funded carers can work with the lighting environment he tolerates and provide food, oral medication, hydration, toileting and hygiene. The fundraiser states explicitly that donations are being used to bring such workers into Victoria Hospital.⁸
That claim comes from Foley and his supporters, rather than from an independent clinical audit, and it should be identified as such. But if accurately describing the present arrangements, it presents an extraordinary picture: charitable money being raised so that outside carers can enter a publicly funded Canadian hospital to provide a long-term disabled patient with assistance in eating, drinking, taking medicines and attending to basic personal needs.
This is where Foley’s experience intersects directly with the argument Nuntiatoria has been developing throughout this year.
In May, The Logic of Elimination: Canada’s MAiD Regime and the Collapse of Moral Limits examined the transformation produced when Canada removed the requirement that death be reasonably foreseeable and created the present two-track system. We argued that once assisted death becomes an answer not merely to imminent dying but to otherwise enduring suffering, the social conditions surrounding that suffering become morally unavoidable. Poverty, inadequate support, isolation and fear of institutionalisation cannot simply be bracketed away while the resulting decision is labelled autonomous.⁹
Last month, in When Food and Water Become “Treatment”, we examined a different but related question: the moral boundary between allowing natural death and making death occur through the withdrawal of ordinary care. The cases are legally distinct, and it would be careless to collapse them into one another. But the civilisational question beneath them is related. What does medicine owe a person whose continued existence requires dependency, expense and sustained care?¹⁰
Then, following the defeat of the latest assisted-suicide Bill at Westminster, Defeated — But Not Settled returned to the language of choice. Britain cannot convincingly describe assisted death as one option among equals, we argued, while palliative care, social care and disability support remain markedly unequal in availability. The state cannot underprovide the means of living and then treat the resulting request for death as though it arose in a vacuum.¹¹
Roger Foley now supplies the human face of all three arguments.
Earlier this month he made essentially the same point himself. Writing in The Critic on 11 September, Foley warned British readers against importing Canada’s experience without understanding what it means for a disabled person trying to secure adequate assistance. His conclusion deserves to become the test against which every claim about autonomous assisted death is measured: “True autonomy requires meaningful alternatives.”¹²
That sentence goes to the heart of the matter.
Canadian law itself recognises part of the problem. Health Canada states that a MAID request must be voluntary and must not result from outside pressure or influence. In cases where natural death is not reasonably foreseeable, practitioners must ensure that applicants are informed about reasonable means of relieving suffering, including disability supports, community services, counselling and palliative care, and must be satisfied that those alternatives have been seriously considered.¹³
But there is a difference between being told that an alternative exists and being able to obtain it.
A disabled person does not possess a meaningful alternative merely because a service appears in a government leaflet. A theoretical entitlement to community support does not place an attendant beside his bed. A nominal home-care programme does not create the individualised assistance without which he cannot safely leave hospital. “You could receive support” and “the support you actually require is available to you” are not interchangeable propositions.
Canada’s own Human Rights Commission has recognised precisely this danger. Its warning could scarcely be more apposite to Foley’s experience: “MAiD cannot be a default for Canada’s failure to fulfill its human rights obligations.”¹⁴
The latest national figures make the issue more, not less, important. Health Canada’s most recent annual report, published in November 2025 and covering the 2024 calendar year, records 16,499 MAID provisions. That represented 5.1 per cent of deaths in Canada. Of those receiving MAID, 15,767 were classified as Track 1, where natural death was reasonably foreseeable, while 732 — 4.4 per cent of MAID provisions — were Track 2 cases in which natural death was not reasonably foreseeable. Since legalisation in 2016, Health Canada records 76,475 MAID provisions through the end of 2024.¹⁵
Those figures do not prove widespread coercion. Nor does the existence of Track 2 prove that individual cases were improperly authorised. They demonstrate something different and indisputable: MAID has become a substantial, institutionalised component of Canadian healthcare. It can no longer be discussed as though it were a rare emergency exception existing at the margins of medicine.
The safeguards therefore matter enormously. But safeguards concerned with voluntary consent cannot be adequate if voluntariness is understood merely as the absence of somebody explicitly ordering a patient to die.
Coercion can be personal. It can also be circumstantial.
A man who is adequately housed, properly nursed, supported by carers, relieved of treatable pain and confident that his dependence does not make him an unwanted expense chooses from one set of circumstances. The same man, unable to obtain suitable care, frightened of an institution, dependent upon exhausted relatives or trapped indefinitely in hospital, chooses from another. His mental capacity may be identical in both situations. The material freedom of the choice is not.
That is why the Foley case cannot be answered merely by saying that Canadian law prohibits external pressure. The harder question is what happens when pressure is created not by a threatening relative or an unscrupulous doctor but by the failure to provide the conditions in which life remains a practicable alternative.
Catholic moral teaching sees immediately what the language of administrative autonomy can obscure. The question is not first whether the patient is useful, independent, economically productive or inexpensive. His dignity precedes all those considerations because it inheres in the human person.
St John Paul II stated the principle without qualification in Evangelium Vitae: euthanasia is “a grave violation of the law of God” because the deliberate killing of the innocent cannot become moral through compassion, consent or legislation.¹⁶ But Catholic teaching is not satisfied merely to prohibit killing. It imposes the positive obligation to care.
Samaritanus Bonus draws the distinction with particular force. Medicine need not impose futile or disproportionately burdensome treatment merely to prolong dying. There are circumstances in which an intervention may properly be withdrawn because it no longer achieves a proportionate therapeutic good. But basic care remains basic care. The document calls nutrition and hydration an “unavoidable human response to the sick person” while the body remains capable of benefiting from them.¹⁷
That distinction prevents two opposite errors. Catholicism does not demand therapeutic obstinacy, pretending that biological life must be extended by every conceivable intervention regardless of burden or futility. Neither does it permit the dependent human being to become disposable because his care is difficult.
Roger Foley is not asking that medicine defeat death indefinitely.
He is asking to be helped to live.
He has now been asking for that assistance for more than a decade.
His story should therefore be stated carefully, because exaggeration only gives defenders of the system an escape route. It has not been established that London Health Sciences Centre deliberately devised a plan to starve Foley until he accepted euthanasia. His lawsuit did not result in a judicial finding that hospital staff unlawfully coerced him towards MAID. His 2025 feeding crisis involved a genuine dispute over lighting, disability accommodation and staff safety, and some hydration and nutritional support continued.
Yet once those qualifications are made, the facts which remain are formidable.
A profoundly disabled Canadian spent years seeking an alternative model of care. Hospital personnel raised assisted death with him, including in a conversation independently obtained by the Associated Press. He told Parliament that he experienced this as coercion. He remained in hospital. A later accommodation dispute severely disrupted his ordinary oral feeding. His family publicly pleaded for intervention. And today he and his supporters say charitable donations are funding independent workers to provide basic assistance inside the hospital where he has lived since 2016.
No sensationalism is required.
The scandal is the contrast.
Canada has constructed a legal and medical apparatus capable of assessing, approving and providing an intentionally hastened death. Roger Foley has spent ten years trying to obtain an arrangement capable of getting him home.
The first is called autonomy.
The second has become a battle.
And that is why his five words should haunt every legislature considering following Canada down the same road:
True autonomy requires meaningful alternatives.
Until a society can guarantee that its sick and disabled citizens are offered assistance in living with at least the determination with which it offers assistance in dying, its language of “choice” remains dangerously incomplete.
¹ Roger Foley, A warning from Canada, The Critic, 11 September 2026.
² Associated Press, Canada’s euthanasia laws trouble experts, 11 August 2022.
³ House of Commons of Canada, Evidence — Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, Meeting No. 6, 10 November 2020.
⁴ Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Foley v. Victoria Hospital London Health Sciences Centre, 2023 ONSC 7155, 19 December 2023.
⁵ Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Foley v. Victoria London Health Sciences Centre, 2024 ONSC 4978, 9 September 2024.
⁶ Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, Roger Foley needs to be fed, 2025; and Feeding Roger Foley — Clarification of update, 18 August 2025.
⁷ Dallas Express, Brother Of Disabled Man To Canadian Hospital: He Is ‘Dying In Front Of You’, 11 June 2025.
⁸ Life Care Network, Please help Roger get the proper care he needs to stay alive, 14 July 2026.
⁹ Nuntiatoria, The Logic of Elimination: Canada’s MAiD Regime and the Collapse of Moral Limits, 15 May 2026.
¹⁰ Nuntiatoria, When Food and Water Become “Treatment”, 28 August 2026.
¹¹ Nuntiatoria, Defeated — But Not Settled, 14 September 2026.
¹² Roger Foley, A warning from Canada, The Critic, 11 September 2026.
¹³ Health Canada, Medical assistance in dying: Overview; Health Canada, Model Practice Standard for Medical Assistance in Dying.
¹⁴ Canadian Human Rights Commission, MAiD cannot be an answer to systemic inequality, 10 May 2022.
¹⁵ Health Canada, Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada, November 2025.
¹⁶ St John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 25 March 1995, §§65–73.
¹⁷ Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Samaritanus Bonus: On the Care of Persons in the Critical and Terminal Phases of Life, 14 July 2020, V.2–3.
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