Simons store at Londonderry Mall in Edmonton on Saturday, August 26, 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson

By The Canadian Press

Fact File: Video of MAID patient playing cello isn’t Canadian government advertising

Mar 31, 2026 | 12:15 PM

A short video shared to social media last week offered a glimpse into the “final days” of a woman at the end of her life. Some claimed the video was an advertisement for medical assistance in dying from the Canadian government or an “assisted suicide company.” The video was in fact produced for a campaign by Quebec-based retailer Simons in 2022.

THE CLAIM

In a 25-second clip shared to social media over the past week, a woman named Jennyfer shares how she imagines her final days.

“I see bubbles. I see the ocean. I see music,” Jennyfer says as music swells in the background and viewers see her in different settings, including playing the cello and blowing bubbles on a beach.

“Even now, as I seek help to end my life, there is still so much beauty,” she says.

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On-screen text appears at the end of the video, stating that Jennyfer died in October 2022.

“Canada is now ADVERTISING government approved medically assisted suicide,” reads a post about the video on the X platform with around 34,000 likes. The post replaced the first i in suicide with an asterisk.

On Instagram and TikTok others repeated the claim that the Canadian government was advertising medical assistance in dying through the video.

Several recent posts on the X platform claimed the advertisement came from “an assisted suicide company in Canada.”

THE FACTS

A reverse image search of a screenshot from the video shows it comes from a 2022 campaign by the Quebec-based department store chain Simons.

Broken Heart Love Affair, the advertising agency that worked on the video, explained on its website that Simons “wanted to open our eyes and create an unignorable tribute to all the beauty that surrounds us.”

It said the three-minute documentary-style video included 30- and 60-second versions made for television.

An article in the trade publication Adnews indicated the video was to air on television and appear online, as well as in public settings, though The Canadian Press could not verify whether the video appeared in those formats.

While the video seems to have been scrubbed from Simons’ social media pages, the Wayback Machine archive shows the company posted the longer version to its YouTube channel on Oct. 24, 2022.

In a separate video posted the next day, the former company president Peter Simons explained the reasoning behind the project. He said the video’s creators wanted to encourage people to see beauty in life’s difficult moments, and the video was meant to celebrate Jennyfer’s life rather than tell a story about the end of her life.

“We wanted to do something that really underlined human connection and perhaps would help people to reconnect to each other,” Simons said. He added that the video was “obviously not a commercial campaign.”

The Simons video received significant attention in 2022, including criticism that it “romanticized” assisted dying, though it did not specifically mention MAID.

The Simons campaign did not include Jennyfer’s last name, but a keyword search shows she was Jennyfer Hatch, who had a connective tissue disorder called Ehlers Danlos syndrome and chose to end her life through MAID at age 37.

According to a CTV News report published after Hatch’s death, she spoke to the broadcaster months earlier using a pseudonym to share concerns about British Columbia’s health system and what she felt was a lack of support for her condition.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 31, 2026.

Marissa Birnie, The Canadian Press