Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is concerned about euthanasia in Canada.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

During a January 30, 2025 interview with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, on the John Bachman Now show, Bachman asked Premier Smith about her concerns with the increase in MAiD in Canada to almost 1 out of 20 deaths. Bachman suggested that to a lot of people the increase in assisted deaths in frightening. Premier Smith's comments on MAiD begin at the 6 minute point:

And it should be frightening.

One of the things that the federal government is allowing is the potential for people to seek MAiD because of mental illness. We've heard of people seeking MAiD because their poor and can't get on government supports. It's outragious.

The intention behind it was always that if death was reasonably foreseeable and imminent from a condition that you weren't going to recover from, like late stage cancer or something along those lines, that a person would have the choice. But it has broadened out to the point where its completely unreasonable.

We've resisted moving down that path. We are creating a separate oversight body to make sure that doctors have the oversight if they do make that determination, so that families can intervene in the event that somebody is just seeking it because they are having a bad patch in life. We don't want somebody feeling so desperate that they think that's the only answer.

We want people to recover, if they can and to get their lives back. So we are taking a little different approach on that.

On February 1, 2023, Alberta premier Danielle Smith objected to the expansion of euthanasia to include mental illness (link)

Alberta Health Services data states that there were 1116 reported assisted deaths in 2024, which was up by almost 15% from 977 in 2023, 836 in 2022 and 594 in 2021. 

Alberta has had the case of the 27-year-old autistic woman, who was approved and scheduled to die by euthanasia on February 1, 2024 until her father challenged the euthanasia approval in court. There was also a case of a Calgary man who couldn't get experimental treatment for cluster headaches but could get approved for euthanasia.

The Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario released a report from the Ontario MAiD Death review Committee outlining six representative stories of non-compliant euthanasia deaths in Ontario. The report indicated that there were at least 428 non-compliant Ontario euthanasia deaths from 2018 to 2023 with 25% of all euthanasia providing doctors, in Ontario, having at least one non-compliant death. We suspect that similar concerns exist with euthanasia in Alberta.

Alberta does not have a MAiD Death Review Committee therefore data about non-compliant euthanasia deaths in Alberta is unknown.