Manitoba doctor accused of defrauding another physician by faking cancer, lying to college
CBC
When Dr. Meaghan Labine met Monica Kehar in 2018, they almost instantly became friends.
The two women had been elected to sit on the national body representing the College of Family Physicians of Canada and appeared to have a lot in common.
Both had gone to medical school and were doing their residencies to become family doctors. Labine was at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine in Thunder Bay, while Kehar was at the University of Manitoba.
But within about eight months in 2019 and 2020, Labine was out $160,000 after Kehar asked her for financial help following her diagnosis with cancer.
When the cancer proved to be fake, Kehar seemed to disappear into thin air.
"My heart just dropped," Labine said in an interview with CBC News from her home in Thunder Bay. "All I thought was, I've been played. Like, I felt like an idiot."
For the past four years, Labine has been on a mission to track Kehar down and bring her former friend to justice. She even hired a private investigator to try to locate her.
Kehar was censured by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba in 2020 and expelled from her medical program after they found she had fabricated evidence of a non-existent serious medical condition.
The expulsion meant she couldn't practise medicine in Canada, but a CBC News investigation found Kehar moved to British Columbia and started an electrical muscle stimulation company — and called herself an MD.
Under Canada's medical regulatory system, even though Kehar is not licensed to practise medicine, she is allowed to call herself an MD or doctor, as long as she is not providing health care or implying she is entitled to practise medicine.
MD is the abbreviation for a doctor of medicine degree, which Kehar has, even though she didn't finish her medical residency and isn't licensed to practise medicine.
An expert in the field says this is misleading and dangerous to the public.
"People are being deceived," said Timothy Caulfield, a University of Alberta professor in the faculty of law and school of public health.
"I'm really concerned with the degree to which the phrase or the word or the title doctor is being used."
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