From Exception to Routine. Why Canada’s State-Assisted Suicide Regime Demands a Human-Rights Review: OpEd

OTTAWA — Canada’s state-assisted suicide program, called MAiD, was sold by the Liberal government as a “stringently limited, carefully monitored system,” a rare option of last resort for people at the very end of life. New data from Health Canada show that in 2024, 16,499 Canadians died by MAiD — 5.1 percent of all deaths in the country.

Does it not follow logically, from these data, that Ottawa’s original framework has, cloaked in the rhetoric of progressively humane ideals, insidiously crept into something far more sinister than what Supreme Court justices, in their wisdom, affirmed in a society-altering Charter of Rights ruling in 2015?

Prior analysis from Cardus, a Canadian faith-based think tank, documented exponential increases from 1,018 deaths in 2016 to 13,241 in 2022 — about a thirteenfold rise — and notes that MAiD has become Canada’s fifth leading cause of death, roughly tied with cerebrovascular disease and behind cancer, heart disease, and accidents.

Under current federal law, eligibility for MAiD is scheduled to expand again in 2027, when people whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness can join the program. A joint House of Commons–Senate committee has recommended extending MAiD to “mature minors.”

Hold on, though. Roughly one in twenty deaths in Canada is now attributed to MAiD. On those numbers alone, rather than moving ahead with this expansion agenda, an external human-rights review should come first — and it should test whether Canada’s existing system is already breaching the rights of disabled, poor and socially isolated people before any further gates are opened.

In a statement this week citing its own prior research, Cardus, a faith-based think tank, added that Health Canada’s own data underlines a massive expansion beyond the “stringently limited, carefully monitored system” of last resort cited by the Supreme Court in 2015.

“Almost 58 percent of Track 1 MAiD recipients and more than 63 percent of Track 2 recipients reported ‘emotional distress/anxiety/fear/existential suffering’ in 2024, a significant jump from around 39 percent and 35 percent respectively in 2023,” Cardus wrote. “Meanwhile, almost half of those who died by MAiD in 2024 reported feeling like a burden on family, friends, or caregivers, maintaining the alarmingly high levels of previous years.”

Canada’s share of deaths from assisted dying is now among the highest in the world.

That is not what Canadians were told to expect when politicians and medical bodies insisted assisted death would be reserved for “rare situations” and “last resort” suffering. It is exactly what critics of a rapidly expanding regime warned about.

A new Angus Reid–Cardus survey, reported in the Catholic Register, suggests Canadians see the danger. Sixty-two percent of respondents — including 61 percent of health-care workers — say they are worried that socially or financially vulnerable people will choose MAiD because they cannot get adequate, quality health care. Health professionals admit they are often ill-equipped to meet the needs of people with disabilities, and nearly half say disabled patients receive “poor or terrible” care in our system.

But even stark data do not tell the whole story.

Recall that in late 2022, Veterans Affairs Minister Lawrence MacAulay acknowledged that a number of Canadian military veterans were casually offered the option of medically assisted death by a now-suspended caseworker. Those veterans were calling their own government for help living with post-traumatic stress, brain injuries and the scars of service. Instead, they were encouraged to explore dying.

An Associated Press investigation in 2024, drawing on private forums used by Canadian doctors and nurses, documented cases where MAiD was approved for people whose primary suffering was homelessness, social isolation or poverty: a homeless man who refused long-term care, a woman with severe obesity, an injured worker living on meagre benefits, grieving widows. Clinicians privately debated whether they were being asked to solve social abandonment with a lethal injection.

Ontario’s chief coroner has now confirmed, in expert reports released alongside that AP probe, that some non-terminal MAiD deaths in the province were driven by “unmet social needs” such as fear of homelessness or uninhabitable housing.

The coroner’s committee estimated that around 2 percent of cases they reviewed may not have followed all legally required safeguards — but no prosecutions have followed. Many of those euthanized came from the poorest parts of the province.

In December 2024, the Catholic Register reported on an Angus Reid–Cardus survey finding that many people with severe disabilities have experienced discrimination and poor care in the health system, while support for ever-broader MAiD access keeps rising. Cardus’s Rebecca Vachon warned that euthanasia is “crippling health-care resources and eroding the doctor-patient relationship.”

More recently, the same magazine highlighted doctors’ concerns about Health Canada messaging that encourages clinicians to raise MAiD discussions earlier with patients as part of “advance care planning.” Physicians interviewed said vulnerable patients already feel “pestered” about MAiD — and worry that a legal obligation to present all options is sliding into a cultural expectation to offer death.

Meanwhile, disability advocates have taken Canada’s MAiD regime directly to the United Nations. In March 2025, Inclusion Canada and allied groups appeared in Geneva before the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, warning that Canada may be breaching its obligations under international disability rights law by offering assisted death to people whose suffering is driven by poverty, lack of care and discrimination.