More than 23,000 Canadians died waiting for treatment in 2025.

How many of these people died by euthanasia rather than wait for treatment?

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, 

Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

This is not new news but 23,746 Canadian patients died on waitlists between April 1, 2024 and March 31, 2025. The Canadian government data released by Second Street in November 2025 does not indicate how these Canadians died, but it is likely that a fairly large percentage of them died by euthanasia.

Canada's euthanasia law does not require a person to first attempt effective treatments before being killed nor does it define euthanasia as a last resort, meaning, there are no effective treatments for the condition.

Canada's law only requires a person to have a terminal condition to be approved for Track 1 euthanasia, which includes no waiting or reflection period or have a grievious and irremediable (not defined in the law) medical conditon to be approved for Track 2 euthanasia, which has a 90 day waiting period.

Terminal condition is not defined by a 6 month or 12 month terminal prognosis, but rather it is an undefined terminal condition, which is why someone with diabetes can qualify.

On March 17, 2026 I published an article estimating that approximately 17,700 Canadians were killed by euthanasia in 2025, an increase of approximately 7% from 16,499 in 2024. I also estimated that Canada would surpass 100,000 euthanasia deaths since legalization in April 2026.

We know that people are "choosing" death by euthanasia based on wait times for surgery and other treatments, but we do not know how many people who died by euthanasia did so because of treatment waiting times.

The Second Street think tank report indicated that the 23,746 figure is low since the report did not include every region of the country and some provinces only shared the data on deaths of people who were waiting for surgery and didn't share data related to diagnostic tests.