Evan Armit at Worcester State University in Massachusetts, where he played for the hockey team and studied business.Supplied
Brian Armit remembers exactly where he was when he got an unexpected call from Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
It was May 9, 2025, and Mr. Armit took the call in the hallway of the Best Western Premier Hotel in Winnipeg, while his 22-year-old son, Evan, rested in their room. Evan’s family, including mom Jennifer and sister Sophie, were in Winnipeg for a Jets playoff game – the last hockey game they would attend together.
Mr. Armit, a long-time OPP officer in the northern Ontario town of Dryden, needed the Premier’s help because his son was dying of melanoma. Evan’s last hope was a cutting-edge treatment called tumour-infiltrating lymphocyte, or TIL, therapy, which had been approved in the United States but was still undergoing regulatory review in Canada.
The Armit family had applied to the Ontario Health Insurance Plan’s out-of-country coverage program with the support of Evan’s doctors, hoping the plan would cover the estimated $750,000 to $1-million cost of his treatment at a Boston hospital.
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OHIP twice denied the request, leading Mr. Armit to e-mail the Premier’s office. Mr. Ford called him the same day. “I was just like, ‘This is great news,’” Mr. Armit recalled. “He just sounded genuine, you know? At the end of the day, it turned out to be nothing. Politicians, you know, they say one thing and do another.”
What Ontario government officials did after Mr. Armit’s initial chat with the Premier was tell the Armit family to follow the process, which in their case entailed filing an appeal to a quasi-judicial tribunal.
The tribunal handed down its decision denying the final appeal on Aug. 28, 2025, four days after Evan, a gregarious and beloved elite hockey player, died at the age of 23. His death happened nine days after Health Canada approved the TIL therapy that might have saved him. By then, it was too late.
“We felt, as treating physicians, there was a reasonable scientific basis for this treatment, and Evan deserved it,” said Joseph Del Paggio, chief of oncology at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre. “He was a young man with a life ahead of him. All the administrative and regulatory and logistical hurdles that we were jumping through took an inordinate amount of time, and that was really the problem here, because Evan didn’t have time.”
Evan’s story highlights an enduring challenge in cancer care in Canada, while at the same time pointing to a new wrinkle that could deepen the problem.
Despite his devastating prognosis, ‘Evan was so positive through everything,’ says his dad Brian, pictured second from left, with Evan’s mom Jennifer and his sister Sophie.Courtesy of family
The long-standing issue is that there is a 2½-year gap, on average, between when new medications are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and when they’re publicly funded in at least one Canadian province.
Mechanisms exist to help patients imperiled by this gap, including Health Canada’s Special Access Program, or SAP, which allows doctors to import drugs not yet licensed here for patients with life-threatening illnesses.
But SAP is not well-suited to TIL therapy or other promising cancer treatments made from and for individuals. TILs are extracted from a specific patient’s tumour, multiplied into the billions in a lab, then infused as a one-time treatment to seek and destroy cancer cells. The version that Evan sought, called lifileucel, sells for US$515,000, not including the cost of staying in an American hospital.
“We can’t just bring the product here,” as we do with off-the-shelf drugs through SAP, said Mina Tadrous, a pharmaceutical policy professor at the University of Toronto.
The real challenge, Dr. Tadrous said, is determining whether Ontario and other provinces should approach cancer therapies made of a patient’s own cells as typical drugs, or as procedures more akin to stem-cell transplants or surgeries. “Really, it’s both,” he said of TIL therapy.
That distinction mattered in the case of Evan Armit. The Ontario Health Services Appeal and Review Board’s decision to deny his appeal hinged on the fact that OHIP’s out-of-country prior approval program “is not a mechanism to provide interim drug funding for indications that are currently being reviewed or expected to be reviewed for public funding in Ontario.”
Knowing that, the executive officer of Ontario’s public drug program recommended against Evan’s initial application to undergo TIL therapy at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. The three members of the appeal panel concluded they had no authority to overrule the executive officer.
Mr. Armit thinks the outcome might have been different if TIL therapy had been considered a procedure, which is more in keeping with what OHIP has traditionally funded through its out-of-country prior approval pathway.
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Ontario spent $46.8-million on out-of-country health services in 2024-2025, the most recent year for which the provincial Ministry of Health provided data, up from $32.4-million in 2020-2021.
The number of applications rose over that time to 1,027 in 2024-2025 from 748 five years earlier. OHIP approved nearly 77 per cent of applications in 2024-2025, roughly in keeping with previous years.
The office of Health Minister Sylvia Jones, which handled The Globe’s written questions for Ms. Jones and Mr. Ford, did not directly respond to questions about Evan’s case. Spokeswoman Lily Barnes said in an e-mail that Ontario doesn’t independently approve drugs or therapies that have not been authorized by Health Canada or made available for sale in Canada.
Ms. Jones called Mr. Armit the same day as Mr. Ford did in 2025, after the Premier promised the Armit family that he would assign his health minister to help.
Evan’s parents are sharing his story hoping it will be a catalyst for change. They would like to see Ontario and other provinces be more flexible about paying for cancer treatment in the U.S. when time is of the essence.
Evan found the first sign of skin cancer in the summer of 2024, just after fulfilling a lifelong dream of travelling around Europe with friends.
Evan Armitt holds a walleye he caught near Dryden, Ont., in 2021.Courtesy of family
There was a black lesion the size of a pencil eraser on his heel. He learned the lesion was positive for melanoma when he had it removed in Thunder Bay, but the margins around it were clear, even after surgeons later made a second, larger incision. It looked like his cancer hadn’t spread.
Doctors told him he was free to return in the fall to Worcester State University in Massachusetts, where he played for the hockey team and studied business. It was only when Evan developed debilitating headaches that it became clear aggressive melanoma had spread to his skull.
Despite his devastating prognosis, “Evan was so positive through everything,” Mr. Armit said.
Ms. Armit added, “He didn’t complain once. Some of his treatments were so horrific, and we never heard him complain.”
Evan’s stoicism and positivity in the face of death was in keeping with how he lived. His eulogy, a copy of which his family shared with The Globe, was bursting with tales of his prowess at sports, his love of the water and of fishing, his work ethic at jobs from McDonald’s to concrete-truck driving, and his kindness to everyone around him, including his younger sister, whom he spoke with every day.
“He was just comfortable around everyone,” Ms. Armit said. “He would be the one at the party holding the baby, or he would be talking to the elderly parents in the corner for an hour, or he would be the first one on the dance floor.”