‘Manon’ by André St-Pierre et al.

Manon Brunelle was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis early in life. The documentary tells the story of her life starting with a suicide attempt that placed her in a medically induced coma for over two months. Manon chose to attempt suicide because medical assistance in dying was not an option to her; she also believed she was a burden on those around her and felt life was not worth living in pain and with limited mobility. After she woke from her coma, she describes poor care conditions and the lengths she went through to avoid the pain of being moved: not requesting to be changed when she soiled herself in the night and not engaging in any activities that would cause her to be moved. The film ends with her journey to Switzerland where she completes the requirement for medical assistance in dying through the organization Dignitas before drinking the life-ending medications and passing away.

The documentary takes place in the Canadian context prior to Criminal Code 241.2 being added to the criminal code in 2016, permitting people like Manon Brunelle to request assistance in dying from the healthcare system. Manon’s story was referenced in multiple parliamentary contexts after the release of this documentary, including in the Canadian Parliament and Senate, and the Quebec National Assembly. The documentary makes a passionate call for medical assistance in dying to be legalized in Canada. The lack of options available to Manon is poignantly felt when she describes why she chose to attempt suicide herself, how arduous the process of recovering from a failed suicide attempt was, and a horrible hospitalization. Her plea in favour of medical assistance in dying includes her analysis that people are “egoists” for considering their own desires and ethics before considering the pain that terminally ill people face. The film also shows how difficult the experience of travelling to another country for assistance in dying is, for example how Manon must be lifted in and out of airplane seats and taxis before her eventual arrival.

* Addendum on 31 August 2026:

With a 64-min running time, the TV documentary Manon was directed by André St-Pierre, with interviews conducted by Benoît Dutrizac between 2003 and 2004. At the time, both St-Pierre and Dutrizac were connected to the Télé-Québec talk show Les Francs-tireurs (the French term for ‘snipers’, but here playing on the translation of ‘straight shooters’ or those who tell it like it is). The Globe and Mail reported that Manon Brunelle herself worked at Télé-Québec ‘​​for years as a production assistant before her multiple sclerosis became so severe that she was forced to move into a long-term-care hospital’. When St-Pierre and Dutrizac first met Brunelle in 2003, it was at one such facility, known in Québec as a CHSLD (Centre d’hébergement et de soins de longue durée). The documentary shows a close-up of Brunelle’s room number ‘185’, then the whole door from a low-angle, before bringing us inside to the sound of ‘Razor Love’ by Neil Young, whom Manon says means a lot to her. In a 2024 interview remembering that first encounter, Dutrizac explains he thought they were doing a report on living conditions in long-term-care homes, but quickly realized Brunelle had another idea in mind: ‘we learned on location that she had started making arrangements to go to Zurich, Switzerland, to Dignitas, which offered this service of assisted suicide… Then at one point… She asked me, would you come with me?’ (translated from French, as all other quotes hereafter). Punctuating Brunelle’s account in Manon, the camera makes frequent use of insert shots: windows, fan, bags, clothes, papers, wheelchair, hands… which give us privileged access to her reality, while creating a clipped pace with abrupt cuts to unexpected angles. Yet, these cuts rarefy in the 6-minute scene during which Brunelle and a Dignitas volunteer, sitting near a table with drinks and documents, talk through the assisted-suicide process and paperwork. Brunelle starts to thank the volunteer saying ‘it’s really a beautiful job you’re doing’, when he corrects her: ‘I like being able to help you, but… you’re the one doing it’. While drinking a sugary anti-emetic mixture ‘to calm her stomach’ (as the volunteer puts it), Brunelle jokes it tastes like mouthwash. After being transported to a bed and before drinking sodium pentobarbital, Brunelle sings Neil Young’s ‘Heart of gold’ with her friend Jean Verrette (a sound technician for Les Francs-tireurs) – and these final scenes would strike the Québecois public much like Ramón Sampedro’s videotaped suicide struck the Spanish in 1998 (see related entry on Mar adentro). In more than one interview, Dutrizac underscores the importance of Verrette’s being there, as a close friend of Brunelle, singing and holding her hand, so she would not die amid strangers.

First aired on Télé-Québec on 18 November 2004, Manon was a central story in a coordinated multi-media campaign that amplified its reach and, in turn, the public discussion on assisted dying in Québec. One day before the TV premiere, the radio program Indicatif Présent aired an interview with Benoît Dutrizac, in which he states that Manon ‘didn’t want to be forgotten’, but ‘wanted, above all, to have control over the end of her life’; about this desire for control, Dutrizac adds – ‘that’s where dignity comes in’. On premiere day, Le Devoir published an advance review by Paul Cauchon, qualifying Brunelle as ‘a strong character… with a sharp intelligence and ironic sense of humour’, who ‘swears, smokes constantly, and expresses herself clearly’. According to the critic, ‘one needs a stone heart not to be shaken by such a documentary, which broaches a taboo’. Cauchon indicates that the airing of Manon would be immediately followed by a round-table moderated by journalist Joane Prince, featuring four guest panellists to debate the controversial topic: judge Jean-Louis Beaudoin, doctor and ethicist Hubert Marcoux, sociologist Joane Martel, and suicidology researcher Brian Mishara. That 60-minute debate was titled Le dernier droit? (literally ‘The last right?’, but also a play on words, since it is colloquially used to refer to the home stretch in a race). Finally, Cauchon announces that Télé-Québec would ‘set up an online forum for internet users’ to weigh in on the debate. Therefore, viewers could ‘react to the documentary’ through the internet portal Manon – Le dernier droit?, which displayed the qualifying subtitle ‘a special program on assisted suicide’ (the documentary-plus-debate combo would eventually be released as a DVD, now only extant in a few Canadian university libraries). One such viewer reaction, signed by Jean-Jacques Stréliski, commends the documentary’s ‘transparency, precision and discretion’, as well as ‘Brunelle’s extraordinary lucidity, courage, and even humour’, but also ‘wonders about the potential abuses of this practice [of assisted suicide]’. Moreover, the internet portal shared the results of a survey conducted by Léger Marketing with 1,000 Quebecers to gauge ‘their opinions and attitudes toward euthanasia’. The poll showed 2/3 ‘would want to be helped to die if they were suffering from an incurable illness’, and nearly 8/10 ‘believe that a person who helped a loved one with an incurable illness to die should not be prosecuted’ (with a margin of error of ±3.4% and 95% confidence).

One way to measure the impact of Brunelle’s story is through the mentions of her name at the Assemblée nationale du Québec (ANQ), appearing as early as 2005 but also throughout the 2009-2012 consultation period leading up to the province’s law on end-of-life care (Bill 52). For example, speaking before an ANQ committee in 2010, the endocrinologist Jana Havrankova cited Brunelle’s case of multiple sclerosis – alongside Sue Rodriguez’s high-profile ALS case (see related Assisted Lab entry) – as examples of patients with neurodegenerative diseases who ‘should have had the right to die with a little more dignity, surrounded by their loved ones, at the very moment they irrevocably declared: Enough is enough’. In 2012, the ANQ committee published its final report (the blueprint for Bill 52), which recommended the creation of ‘medical aid in dying’ (MAiD) as a concept legally distinct from ‘assisted suicide’. Given that criminal law falls under federal jurisdiction in Canada but healthcare is strictly provincial, Québec was able to present MAiD as a new medical option for end-of-life care without breaking anti-suicide federal laws – thus passing its groundbreaking Bill 52 in 2014 (while the federal government would only legislate on assisted dying in 2016, through Bill C-14). However, Québec’s medicalization of aid in dying would still have deemed illegal Brunelle’s act of ingesting the toxin provided by Dignitas, as Bill 52 requires the euthanasic act to be performed by a physician (the 2016 federal Canadian law would allow both physician- and self-administered death as MAiD options outside Québec). Furthermore, linking eligibility to having a public healthcare card (which excludes short-term and temporary visitors, such as international students) prevented ‘suicide tourists’ from accessing MAiD – so, if the roles were reversed and Manon had been a Swiss visitor to Canada, she would not have had access. The difficult issue of what characterizes ‘terminality’ may also have disqualified Brunelle before 2021, when a ‘Track 2 MAiD’ was created for those whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable (before Track 2, the requirement of a foreseeable death was left vague, but generally interpreted as ‘less than 1 year’). Regardless of eligibility criteria, Dutrizac has maintained that Québec’s Bill 52 should have been called ‘the Manon Brunelle Law’, because even though ‘there were [other] women and men who carried the social, political, and scientific message… it was Manon who carried the human message’.