It’s September, and Stacey Hume is next to her dad’s hospital bed in the palliative ward of Edmonton’s Grey Nuns Community Hospital. She, along with her mom and sister, are told by staff that they need to make a choice about her dad.

Either contend with him possibly dying at a red light, alone in the ambulance, or remain in the hospital, where “it could be three, four or five more days of him hanging on like this,” recalled Hume.

Her dad, William Hume, was dying. He had been diagnosed with late-stage gastroesophageal cancer just a few months earlier. William wanted MAID, and was assessed and approved soon after he was diagnosed.

But the procedure is prohibited at Grey Nuns, where William was admitted, as it was the only Edmonton hospital with an ER bed available. The hospital is operated by Covenant Health — a publicly funded, Catholic health-care provider in Alberta — which does not allow MAID to be administered at any of its sites. William would have to be transferred to another facility.