It’s always difficult losing a loved one to a sudden heart attack, but it’s so much more tragic when the loss was preventable. It’s been a bitter pill to swallow for the kids and grandkids of long-time Niverville resident Debbie Fewster.
Debbie’s story isn’t new. Every year, Canadians die before they make it to their life-saving surgery date. But as in Debbie’s case, they also die because the wait list to get surgery far exceeds what’s reasonable given their condition.
On October 13, 2024, at 69 years of age, Debbie breathed her last. It was two full months after her cardiologist diagnosed her with three blocked arteries.
She was in need of quick intervention and told she should expect a wait time of about three weeks.
Debbie’s son Daniel Fewster says that Manitoba’s healthcare system boasts even shorter average wait times than that.
“According to the Province of Manitoba website, the median wait time [for surgery like this] is 12 days,” Fewster says. “From the time that she failed the stress test to her death was more than 60 days.”
Since then, both Fewster and his sister, Colleen Dyck, have made it their mission to try and bring change to a system that is failing so many Canadians.
They’re not interested in litigation. They’re not even looking for an apology. What they are looking for is the enactment of something they call Debbie’s Law.
Working together with SecondStreet.org, a nonprofit Canadian public policy think tank, Debbie’s Law would compel health authorities to ensure that patients are informed when life-saving treatment cannot be provided within the medically recommended timeframe. Doctors and specialists would then be at liberty to advise alternatives, such as out-of-province treatment.
It’s an option that Debbie’s kids say they would have jumped at had they known their mom’s surgery wait time would be so long.
After numerous meetings with SecondStreet.org, Fewster and Dyck hosted a press conference on Wednesday, March 12 in Winnipeg. Each sibling made a heartfelt presentation to the media.
“We know we are not alone,” Dyck said. “Many others have lost loved ones, not because their conditions were untreatable but because they were waiting… Debbie’s Law won’t fix everything, but it will introduce something that is desperately needed: radical honesty.”
Fewster’s testimony was equally pointed.
“My mom paid into healthcare her whole life,” he said. “When she needed them, they weren’t there. There’s no refund, no money-back guarantee. They didn’t even offer alternatives—nothing to bridge the gap when they knew they couldn’t respond in time… We trusted the system to save her, but it failed her. It failed us. It’s failing too many others… If the government is going to monopolize healthcare, then they need to come up with a model and product that can meet the needs of the Canadians paying for it, when they need it.”
Since that press conference, the Fewster siblings say they’ve been hearing from complete strangers whose stories of premature loss echo their own.
Kathleen Cook, a Winnipeg MLA and the Progressive Conservative’s healthcare critic, has promised to push for debate on Debbie’s Law at question period in the Legislature in the coming weeks. Fewster and Dyck hope to be present when that happens.
Immediately prior to their interview with The Citizen, the pair received a phone call from a patient relations representative at the St. Boniface Hospital, where Debbie’s surgery should have taken place. They have offered to set up a meeting between Fewster, Dyck, and the CEO of the hospital.
It was the first communication they’d received from anyone in the healthcare system since Debbie’s passing, with the exception of an invoice that came in the mail from Southern Health-Sante Sud, charging them for the ambulance transport.
Debbie’s Story
Debbie wasn’t the first in her family to deal with the sudden onset of heart disease. Her father died of a heart attack decades earlier. Debbie’s older brother was diagnosed with angina, just like Debbie, about 20 years prior.
Thankfully for him, surgery was quick and he lives a vibrant, active life today.
Debbie’s mother died at the age of 102, proving that longevity was also in the family genes.
For Debbie’s kids, there was no reason to believe she wouldn’t make it to a ripe old age. She was an avid hiker and lifelong participant in sports. She ate a clean diet and never took her health for granted.
“As recently as last April, she was hiking for two hours per day on Vancouver Island with my sister,” Dyck says.
Not long after, though, Debbie began to feel pressure in her chest. She thought it was heartburn.
By July, she saw her family doctor, who fast-tracked her for testing. In August, Debbie was put through the rigours of a cardio stress test. She made it only three minutes into a 20-minute exercise before they determined that her condition was severe enough to be considered urgent.
She was given medication and a post-surgery checkup for November, then instructed to wait for a call from the hospital.
That’s when things seemed to come to a standstill.
After weeks of waiting, Debbie grew worried. She contacted the hospital, wondering why she wasn’t receiving news. According to the family, she was told that the delay was a result of “catchup” after summer vacation.
Leap-forward to October and she still had no indication that her surgery was imminent. Enjoying a Thanksgiving meal with her kids, she left the gathering early, feeling poorly.
Not long after, she called her daughter for help. Dyck and Fewster were at her side when the paramedics arrived. Unfortunately, they couldn’t keep Debbie’s heart pumping.
Fewster says the medical responders on site that night weren’t surprised to hear that Debbie had died while waiting for surgery.
“One police officer interrupted me and said, ‘Hey, I’ve lost two family members to this as well, waiting on a list,’” Fewster says. “And she said, ‘You would not believe how many calls we respond to where this is the situation… It happens constantly.’”
Everyone for Themselves
In the brief time since Dyck and Fewster began this journey, they’ve heard of countless others who faced interminably long wait lists in Manitoba—indeed, across Canada.
In some cases, the individual is confident that the only reason they’re alive today is because of advice given them by their doctor: go straight to the emergency room and don’t leave until they’re given a surgery date.
Debbie never received that advice. On her own, it wouldn’t have come naturally to push herself to the front of a line of people all needing life-saving intervention.
For Dyck and Fewster, this new knowledge of how our healthcare system operates is a telling example of a broken system.
“It feels sick to think that that’s how we’re being forced to use the system,” says Dyck. “You literally have to elbow your way in.”
Fuelling the siblings’ determination was the response from Uzoma Asagwara, Manitoba’s Minister of Health. Asagwara was quoted by press as saying that if a resident in Manitoba needs life-saving surgery, they will get it.
“It’s just not true,” Dyck says. “They don’t even have the data to determine if it’s true because they don’t track these things. It’s a very defensive position for a health minister to take. That’s really worrying on a lot of levels. Are we supposed to trust our leadership?”
Proper data tracking and public transparency of that data is another aspect of Manitoba healthcare the siblings would like to see changed through Debbie’s Law.
Through their affiliation with SecondStreet, it has become painfully evident to Dyck and Fewster that the local healthcare system takes a lax approach to recording reasons for death while on a waiting list.
In Dyck’s opinion, if you don’t have an adequate way of tracking patients who die while awaiting life-saving surgery, the system has no report card to tell them how they’re doing.
“Some healthcare regions track it some years, then they don’t other years, and then they sort of track it,” Dyck says. “It’s just a gong show… It would be as simple as having a dropdown menu that would indicate why a person’s name is being taken off the waiting list.”
According to SecondStreet data, nearly 75,000 patients died across Canada while waiting on various surgeries and diagnostic scans since the 2018–2019 fiscal year.
“That number, staggering as it is, does not cover every jurisdiction,” says a SecondStreet policy brief. “Because many provinces simply don’t track the problem, the true figure is likely much higher.”
The public healthcare system should not be excluded when it comes to accurately tracking, recording, and sharing important data, says SecondStreet. In fact, it’s exactly what the government expects of every private business and corporation.
For instance, if an automaker sees a potentially dangerous issue arise with any of their products on the market, they are required to both recall the product and then inform every single person who owns the impacted vehicle.
For food producers and importers, the legal requirements are the same and punishable by severe fines if they don’t comply.
For organizations like SecondStreet, retrieving the existing healthcare data on waiting list deaths hasn’t been easy. To do so, they needed to first apply for its release through a Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act request, and in some cases they paid a fee.
This lack of public transparency, Dyck says, needs to change. If the healthcare system is doing so well, as Asagwara suggests, the evidence should be available to prove it.
But it wasn’t always this way, Dyck and Fewster believe. There was a time, they say, under previous governments, when patients were regularly sent out of province or even to other countries in order to ensure a rapid response to the need for surgery and diagnostics.
According to Fewster, this is also how the healthcare system operates throughout the European Union.
“If you live in Brussels and you can’t get hip surgery, you can fly to Dublin and get the surgery done and the Brussels [healthcare system] will pay for it,” says Fewster.
Dyck and Fewster want to make it perfectly clear, though, that this is not a reflection on the province’s hard-working doctors, nurses, and surgeons. They’re giving their all. It’s the system that’s failing.
“We’re spending more than we ever have [on healthcare],” Dyck says. “What we’re spending per patient outpaces inflation and we’re getting worse care. And our wait times are through the roof.”
The trickle-down effect of long medical wait times goes beyond the people who die and those who love them, adds Dyck. There are countless Manitobans who cannot work or live well without diagnostics and surgery.
The siblings tell of an acquaintance who has been forced to collect employment insurance for upwards of 18 months while waiting on surgery to repair an injury. It’s taking a toll on his mental well-being.
Is there anything the public can do? Fewster and Dyck believe so. They encourage every taxpayer to write to the provincial health minister requesting that Debbie’s Law be put into action.
“We really want to do justice in representing the unheard voices, because there’s thousands of them,” Fewster says. “Right now, we have an opportunity to be a voice for them.”
