Canadian with dementia Euthanized at Family’s Request

This article was published by National Review online on October 2, 2025

Previous article: Dementia patient died by euthanasia. The family made the request (Link).

Wesley Smith

By Wesley J Smith

Euthanasia/assisted suicide “protective guidelines” don’t really protect against abuse. They mostly serve as window dressings to make people comfortable with killing the sick. And soon after legalization, the vaunted protections are redefined by activists and the media as “barriers” to death, which become the pretext for loosening the already slack guidelines. The speed at which that happens varies, but the pattern rarely fails.

Here’s an example. In Canada, a person is supposed to explicitly request and consent to being killed by a lethal jab. But a dementia patient was recently euthanized at the request of her family. From the National Post story:

A frail women in her late 80s with dementia received MAID after a family member brought forward a request for an assisted death, a new report reveals. The woman’s life was ended after a MAID provider deemed the woman had given her final expressed consent to proceed, based on her ability to repeat a question and squeeze the provider’s hand.

My mother died of Alzheimer’s. I could have easily maneuvered her into a situation where she would have seemed to have consented to assisted suicide. These patients are so vulnerable and what they think or feel one minute often changes dramatically in the next.

Back to the story:

The case is among half a dozen flagged in the latest report from the Office of the Ontario Chief Coroner’s MAID Death Review Committee. Together they’re raising questions around how MAID is being approved for people with dementia, including whether people are receiving MAID without proper assessments to determine if they have the capacity to consent to death.

Of course they are. And I predict nothing will be done about it. That’s the usual pattern.

Adding to the insult, dementia patients are not receiving proper levels of palliative care in Ontario:

“What really stuck out to me is that people with dementia are choosing MAID for feelings like loss of dignity, perceived burden, emotional distress and fear,” said family physician and committee member Dr. Ramona Coelho.

Palliative care can help people grappling with such existential suffering, she said. Yet the report found only 13.6 per cent of people with dementia who died by MAID in Ontario in 2023 and 2024 received palliative care, compared to 82.3 per cent of people who received MAID for other causes.“If MAID is not to be the path of least resistance, but really the choice, then when people are scared and they need care, they should be accessing that care,” Coelho said.

But euthanasia becomes the easier path once we objectify the lives of patients and demote them from full equality into a killable caste.

This is bad. Imagine how much worse it will be when people can sign advance directives in Canada ordering themselves killed when they become incompetent, as they currently can in Netherlands and Belgium. It can even lead to a forced exit.

Legalizing euthanasia/assisted suicide profoundly changes societal values at a fundamental level. Canada is our closest cultural cousin. Cultural devolution will happen here, too, if we don’t hit the brakes on legalizing assisted suicide.

Previous article about this story:

• Dementia patient died by euthanasia. The family made the request (Link).