Archie Rolland: A MAID Victim of Inhumane Care

Case reference: MAID-QC-2016-SPAB · Métis-sur-Mer, Quebec · Died by MAID · Classified by the register as a MAID death

Who he was

Archibald “Archie” Rolland was a landscape architect from Montreal. A family photo from 2000 shows him standing in the Métis Gardens, arm raised, under a garden arch. He was the beloved son of Alison Rolland and the late John A. Rolland. He lived with ALS for about 15 years. In his final years he depended on a ventilator to breathe and typed one letter at a time using special glasses linked to a laptop on his hospital bed.

For eight years he lived at the Montreal Chest Hospital, a unit specialized in patients with severe respiratory illness, where he said he got the care he needed.

What happened

In January 2015, the Montreal Chest Hospital unit closed, and Rolland was moved to the Camille-Lefebvre wing of Lachine Hospital, a geriatric long-term care facility that had been repurposed for up to 20 heavy-needs patients. Families of nearly two dozen patients protested that the unit was not equipped for them. Rolland sent a trail of emails to the head nurse, the ombudsman and hospital officials documenting complaints about his care. In one incident, his family said, an assistant nurse failed to clear a thick mucus plug from his windpipe and ignored his ringing ventilator alarm until his mother ran for help. “If my mother wasn’t there, I might have died,” he wrote in October 2015.

On 4 July 2016, Rolland left the facility. Three days later, on 7 July, he died at the family’s country home in Métis-sur-Mer, surrounded by his mother, his cousin Dr. David Price and friends. The Ottawa Citizen reported that he “requested and received assisted death.” Some media, including the Montreal Gazette, described his death as the withdrawal of his ventilator under sedation; the register records it as a MAID death, because it was the assisted death he sought after being denied humane care.

Why they were pushed toward MAID

It was not ALS that brought Archie Rolland to a MAID death. He had lived with the disease for 15 years. It was the care he was left in at Lachine. He told the Montreal Gazette that it wasn’t the illness that was killing him: he was tired of fighting for compassionate care. “The people here don’t understand ALS and can’t look after me,” he wrote. “It is unbearable.” And: “I am suffering too much to live. And the current system is inhuman.” He said he would rather die than continue to suffer what he called inhumane treatment. His family looked into moving him to an ALS ward in Ontario, but the waitlist was many months long.

In the months after his death, all four doctors assigned to the unit resigned; a hospital employee told the Gazette their pleas for more support had led nowhere. Three patients on the unit died within a week of each other. The hospital said deaths are to be expected among very sick patients in long-term care and denied that deaths on the unit were connected to the quality of care.

What their family says

His cousin, Dr. David Price, told the Gazette that Rolland was living with a disease that kept getting worse, “and with the recognition of no likely improvement in living conditions. He was in pain and uncomfortable, he was tired and he’d had enough.”

Catherine Frazee, a former Ontario human rights commissioner, drew the wider lesson in the Ottawa Citizen: “What Mr. Rolland wanted was not too much to ask – simple respect and excellent care. When Archie Rolland could not, after persistent attempts, have what he wanted, he chose assisted death. And that choice was honoured.”

What this case shows

Archie Rolland’s death came in the first weeks of Canada’s MAID law, and it set the pattern that later cases would follow. A disabled man who wanted to live well asked, again and again, for decent care. When it did not come, death became the only relief left to him. Archie Rolland was a MAID victim, not of his disease, but of the care he was denied. His case is an early warning of what happens when MAID is offered where care has failed.

Sources

• Montreal Gazette: Saying goodbye to Archie Rolland, who chose to die: ‘It is unbearable’
• Montreal Gazette: Doctors quit Lachine chronic-care unit slammed by patients’ families
• Ottawa Citizen: Beware of assisted dying as ‘shame relief,’ former human rights commissioner says
• Legacy.com: Archibald ROLLAND Obituary (2016)