By Kelsi Sheren | Substack.com/@KelsiSheren

Dying With Dignity Canada’s own audited financials show a 26% jump in ad spending. One in three donated dollars now goes to marketing. Here’s the paper trail.

Do you see this number?

$1,013,241.

$1,013,241.

$1,013,241.

$1,013,241.

That’s what Dying With Dignity Canada (DWDC) spent on “advertising and promotions” in 2025. Not my number. Theirs. It’s on page 5 of their audited financial statements, signed off by their accountants this past April, posted on their own website.

The year before? $803,555.

That’s a 26% increase in one year.

While families were burying their loved ones and asking how this happened, while disability advocates were begging Parliament to slow down, while international observers were raising alarms about this country—DWDC’s response was to pour another $200,000 into marketing.

Marketing what, exactly?

Death. That’s the product. There is no other product.

Do the math with me: their audited statements say they took in $2,976,918 in donations in 2025.

They spent $1,013,241 on advertising and promotions.

That’s 34 cents of every donated dollar. One in three. Somebody’s grandmother writes a cheque because she believes in “compassion and choice,” and a third of it goes to ads.

Now look at the rest of the expense sheet.

Advertising: $1,013,241.

“Financial support”: $24,086.

That’s the line item. Twenty-four thousand dollars. The advertising budget is 42 times larger than the line marked financial support. Yes, their program work also runs through that $1.67 million in salaries I’m not pretending otherwise. But that cuts the other way too: salaries and advertising together are 70% of everything this organization spends. The overwhelming majority of the money goes to staff and marketing. Not to the dying people it claims to serve.

AND!! on top of the million they purchased, their own accounting notes say they received another $110,792 in donated advertising “contributions in kind related to advertising.” So the real advertising footprint last year was over $1.1 million.

An organization that tells you it exists to support people at the end of life spent more on promotion than on rent, travel, meetings, insurance, and direct financial support to actual human beings combined, several times over.

Seven Thousand Ads

I pulled Meta’s Ad Library report this week. From July 16, 2019 to July 15, 2026, Dying With Dignity Canada spent $720,193 on Facebook and Instagram ads. That’s up more than $100,000 since I last checked, a year ago.

But the number that should stop you isn’t the dollars. It’s the ad count: 6,782.

Six thousand, seven hundred and eighty-two individual ads. Over seven years, that’s a new ad going up roughly two and a half times a day.

Every day.

Weekends. Christmas. Suicide Prevention Week. Somebody at that organization comes to work each morning, and their job is to put another death ad into your feed.

Suicide prevention organizations in this country operate under safe-messaging guidelines. They are careful—agonizingly careful—about how they talk about death, because they know messaging kills. Meanwhile, the country’s largest assisted-death cult advocacy group runs paid campaigns with no equivalent guardrails, aimed at the exact population those guidelines exist to protect: the sick, the old, the disabled, the depressed, the alone.

The Part That Made Me Put My Coffee Down

Note 5. Buried on page 12 of their audited statements.

“The Organization is the beneficiary of certain life insurance policies.”

Read that again. The charity that lobbies to expand assisted death—for mature minors, for mental illness, for advance requests—is named as the beneficiary on people’s life insurance policies. They carry the cash surrender value on their books: $61,394 and growing.

They also promote “legacy giving.” Leave a gift in your will, they say—a “simple way to create an impactful and enduring legacy of compassion and choice,” and it works. The Walrus reported that in 2018, DWDC received $7 million from the estate of the late Vancouver entrepreneur David Jackson—a windfall described as transformational, one that Democracy Watch’s co-founder said would instantly make any group a top lobby in this country on any issue. It has been reported that Jackson himself died by euthanasia. Court filings from the organization’s former CEO put the bequest even higher, at $7.75 million.

Follow the loop. A person dies under the system this organization spent decades building. The money flows back to the organization. The organization spends it on advertising. The advertising reaches the next person.

That’s not a charity. That’s a flywheel.

Here’s another thing their own auditors put in writing: DWDC is sitting on $8.76 million in investments. Bonds, GICs, Canadian equities, foreign equities, American Depositary Receipts. They made $646,153 in investment income last year—more than they spent on rent, professional services, and travel combined.

Charity Intelligence looked at their books and noted their reserves could cover program costs for over four years. Four years. They could stop fundraising tomorrow and keep running until 2030.

They don’t need your money to operate. They need your money to advertise DEATH.

Everything above is documented. Their statements, their auditors, their website, Meta’s own transparency report. Go download the financials yourself.

What follows is my opinion, and I’ve earned it: an organization whose only product is death, that spends a third of its donations advertising that product, that names itself the beneficiary of its supporters’ life insurance, that solicits bequests from the very people whose deaths it champions—is not a human rights charity. It’s a marketing operation with a body count.

They’re not hiding it. It’s in the financials.

They just don’t think you’ll read them.

I did.

Sources:

• Dying With Dignity Canada, Audited Financial Statements, year ended December 31, 2025 (auditor’s report dated April 24, 2026): https://www.dyingwithdignity.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/20251231-DWDC-Financial-Statements.pdf
• Meta Ad Library Report, “Spending by advertiser,” Dying With Dignity Canada, Jul 16, 2019–Jul 15, 2026: $720,193 across 6,782 ads (pulled July 19, 2026)
• Miranda Schreiber, “The Lobby Group That Owns the Conversation around Assisted Deaths,” The Walrus, January 2024: https://thewalrus.ca/dying-with-dignity-lobby/
• The Globe and Mail, “Former CEO of Dying with Dignity Canada accuses organization of systemic discrimination in lawsuit,” October 2019
• Charity Intelligence Canada, review of Dying With Dignity Canada: https://www.charityintelligence.ca/charity-details/458-dying-with-dignity-canada
• Kelsi Sheren, “Corporate Killers: How Bell Donates and Meta Profit From Canada’s MAiD Suicide Crisis,” Substack, July 2025

Originally published at substack.com/@kelsisheren