To Torontonians, Mark Selkirk was “the moose maker,” the man behind the 326 life-size moose sculptures that once graced the city’s streets.

But to his wife Debra Selkirk, Mark was more than just a man of the community: he was a husband, father and grandfather. He was also a lifelong alcoholic.

It was acute alcoholic hepatitis that brought Mark to Toronto General Hospital in November 2010. The couple was told Mark needed a liver transplant.

“Basically the doctor walked into the room and said, ‘Your liver’s done. The risk of death is very high,’ ” Selkirk told the Star last week. “Her next question was, ‘When did you have your last drink.’ Mark said, ‘Six weeks.’ She said, ‘They won’t even look at you.”

In Ontario, patients in need of a liver transplant must be six months sober before they are put on the transplant list. It’s a policy set by the Trillium Gift of Life Network, the province’s organ and tissue donation agency, and enforced by transplant centres like Toronto General’s Multi-Organ Transplant Program (MOTP).

Two weeks after the couple was told Mark would need — but wasn’t eligible for — a liver transplant, he was dead, Selkirk said.

She says she is preparing to file a constitutional challenge against the policy, which she says discriminates against people who suffer from alcoholism.

“With universal health care, which as Canadians we pride ourselves on, every person who goes to a doctor or a hospital in Ontario has the exact same right to have their disease cured or treated, their condition improved, or their life save, regardless of who they are or how they got there, what their lifestyle is. We have the same right, under the law, to treatment,” Selkirk said.

Selkirk has already filed a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario and a personal claim in Divisional Court asking for compensation for 20 years of income; both were dismissed on time delay, she said.

Selkirk said doctors did not say Mark would need a liver transplant before he was admitted to Toronto General, and the couple was unaware of the six-months-sober policy. She said she believes she or one of the couple’s six children — all from previous marriages — would have been a match for a living donation based on criteria she has researched, but a doctor told her they “wouldn’t waste money” on the surgery.

Dr. Atul Humar, medical director of the University Health Networks’s transplant program at Toronto General who was not involved in Mark’s case, said the hospital will not perform a living donor transplant unless doctors feel the recipient is a suitable candidate for transplant, because of the risks related with a major operation. He said it has nothing to do with cost.

Some patients’ livers recover enough during six month of abstinence that they no longer need a transplant, he said. The abstinence period is applied to both alcoholics and illicit drug abusers.

Humar said patients able to abstain from drinking before a transplant are less likely to abuse alcohol afterwards: “The last thing we want is someone to get a new liver and start damaging that liver by drinking alcohol again.”

A University of Pittsburgh study conducted in 2008 found 6 per cent of liver-transplant patients who once abused alcohol relapsed each year. About 2.5 per cent of returned to drinking heavily each year. Being abstinent for more than six months has only moderately impacted success, they concluded.

Humar said many studies have been done in the decade since which show the longer a patient is sober prior to transplant, the lower the likelihood of relapse. “It’s a difficult choice. Unfortunately, organs are a finite resource and these are difficult decisions that have to be made.”

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Ronnie Gavsie, president and CEO of Trillium Gift of Life Network, said policies are set based on advice from a liver-specific working group of physicians and senior administrators from transplant centres in Ontario working off international research results, she said. The policies are revisited yearly to make sure they are based on the most up-to-date research.

The policy is not controversial within the international medical community, she said, and no patients or their families have come directly to Trillium to fight the policy. “Any such discussions would take place between the patient and or the patient’s family and their physician,” Gavsie said. “It’s up to the transplant centre to enforce.”

Billie Potkonjak, director of health promotions and patient services at the Canadian Liver Foundation said the organization does not support the policy. It believes anyone diagnosed with liver disease should be eligible for a transplant — “it doesn’t matter how you got it, liver disease is liver disease.”

James Robert Brown, a University of Toronto philosophy professor at the and expert in philosophical and political issues in science, said all people should to be treated for liver disease in the same way. “The only thing one can suspect is that the policy got invoked for moralistic reasons; we don’t like alcoholics. But I’m surprised, because we tend not to like obese people or people who got hepatitis from, perhaps, drug use,” he said.

Selkirk said she hopes to file the constitutional challenge in the next few months. She said she doesn’t blame Toronto General for her husband’s death; it’s the policy’s stigma and discrimination that Selkirk is taking on.

“My application to the (Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario) did not name any specific doctors because I don’t want to point the finger at one doctor. I want to say, ‘The problem is your policy, and that’s what needs to change.’ ”