The Rise of Euthanasia in Canada: From Exceptional to Routine.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Canada had approximately 15,280 euthanasia deaths in 2023 (Article Link).

I would like to thank Alexander Raikin for his research report on the Rise of Euthanasia in Canada that was produced for and published by Cardus.

In one week there have been three exceptional studies on Canada's euthanasia program published from different perspectives. I hope that the interest in Canada's euthanasia law will lead to changes and a social shift towards rejecting the killing of people by lethal poison.

The first study was a landmark study by Chelsea Roff and Catherine Cook-Cottone on Assisted Death and Eating Disorders. (Link 2).

The second was a research study by Professor Christopher Lyon that asked the question: Does Canada's euthanasia law enable healthcare serial killers?

This third study, by Alexander Raikin, examines the change in the attitude towards euthanasia in Canada under the title: The Rise of Euthanasia.

The Rise of Euthanasia in Canada: From Exceptional to Routine.

Alexander Raikin

The key points by Raikin are:

• The number of Canadians dying prematurely by “medical assistance in dying” (MAiD) has risen thirteenfold since legalization. In 2016, the number of people dying in this way was 1,018. In 2022, the last year for which data are available, the number was 13,241.
• MAiD in Canada is the world’s fastest-growing assisted-dying program.
• MAiD is now tied with cerebrovascular diseases as the fifth leading cause of death in Canada. Only deaths from cancer, heart disease, COVID-19, and accidents exceed the number of deaths from MAiD.
• Assisted dying was not meant to become a routine way of dying. Court rulings stressed that it be a “stringently limited, carefully monitored system of exceptions.” Then Minister of Justice and Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould agreed: “We do not wish to promote premature death as a solution to all medical suffering.” The Canadian Medical Association likewise stated that MAiD was intended for rare situations.
• MAiD assessors and providers do not treat it as a last resort. The percentage of MAiD requests that are denied continues to decline (currently it is 3.5 percent). MAiD requests can be assessed and provided in a single day.
• Government departments and agencies continue to state that Canada’s MAiD experience is similar to that of other jurisdictions, that the rate of increase is expected, and that the growth is gradual. The data contradict these statements.
• Health Canada has dramatically underestimated what a “steady state” of MAiD deaths would look like and how quickly Canada would reach the 4 percent threshold of total deaths. This threshold was reached in 2022, eleven years ahead of what Health Canada predicted only months earlier, and double its prediction just four years earlier.
• Despite the importance of accurate vital statistics, some provinces’ death records do not record MAiD as a cause of death, instead recording the underlying condition that led to the MAiD request and subsequent death. Further, Health Canada reports on the number of MAiD deaths, but Statistics Canada does not consider MAiD a cause of death. These inconsistencies in reporting have an impact on research about MAiD and about causes of death more generally.
• The systematic underestimation of MAiD in government statements and reporting is a serious impediment to understanding the scale of MAiD’s normalization in Canada and its abnormality with regard to other countries where some form of assisted dying is permitted.
• For policymakers and the public to properly understand the Canadian reality, it is essential that government agencies collect consistent data and issue correct statements.

Euthanasia was sold to Canadians as a "last resort" but in fact it has been normalized as "medical treatment." The number of Canadian euthanasia deaths has far exceeded the projected numbers and euthanasia has been falsely asserted to be a "right" in Canada.

The well-funded euthanasia lobby in Canada.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

An interesting article about the euthanasia lobby group - Dying With Dignity (DWD) Canada was written by Miranda Schreiber and published by the Walrus on January 12, 2024. Schreiber provides important information about the financing and positions of DWD Canada.

DWD supports MAiD by advanced request

Schreiber sets up the article with the following paragraph:

Dying with Dignity Canada isn’t just a charity; it’s also the country’s biggest pro-MAID lobby group. Theoretically, lobby groups are meant to allow for the interests of all stakeholders to be represented to the government. But when a lobby group is so well funded that it wields disproportionate power over a debate, the voices of less powerful parties can be neglected. Some critics believe public conversations around MAID are skewed in Dying with Dignity Canada’s favour. And when it lobbies to expand access to assisted dying, few have the resources to push back.

Dying with Dignity lost their charitable status in February 2015 for "serious non-compliance issues" which made them become more politically oriented. But in 2018 DWD received regained charitable status and received a massive donation. Schreiber explains:

In 2018, Dying with Dignity Canada received a donation of $7 million from the late Vancouver entrepreneur David Jackson, an amount that’s been described as transformational. “Being handed 7 million without having to spend any money raising it would make any group [a] top lobby group [in Canada] right away on any issue,” says Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch, a democratic reform and corporate responsibility advocacy group.

That year, the Supreme Court had thrown out the stipulation that to receive tax-exempt status, charities could direct only 10 percent of their funds toward political purposes. As a result, Dying with Dignity Canada had its status as a charitable organization reinstated, meaning it was eligible for government funding.

DWD was organizing events with the goal of expanding Canada's euthanasia law. Those events included Justice Minister David Lametti, as a speaker and other political leaders. Schreiber states:

In 2020, Dying with Dignity Canada registered with the federal government as a lobby group while still being recognized as a charity. The group sent Health Canada a letter proposing amendments to regulations, issued in 2022, for how to monitor and document MAID deaths. Dying with Dignity Canada also provided input to the Parliamentary Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying (AMAD), which submitted a report in 2023 that reviewed key issues related to assisted dying, including the possibility of expanding eligibility to mature minors and people with mental illness.

Trudo Lemmens

Lemmens says that, having worked in his field since the early 1990s, “I don’t know of any bioethics debates . . . where the government have felt so comfortable appointing or basically promoting the view of specialists associated so directly with a lobby group in favour of one side of the issues.”

“Lobby groups and advocacy groups are obviously part of the political landscape,” Lemmens says. But a healthy democracy, he continues, requires “a certain distance between interest groups and decision makers.” Dying with Dignity Canada “established strong connections in the political and medical establishment,” he says. “Their strong funding base has enabled them to have a disproportionate impact on the legal developments and the public discourse.”

In its 2021 report DWD Canada acknowledged their meetings with cabinet ministers and their political pressure campaign to get Bill C-7 passed. Since Bill C-7 passed there have been many examples of people with disabilities, people living in poverty, people who are homeless, people who are unable to obtain medical treatment, and more, being approved or dying by euthanasia and yet DWD claims this is a myth. Schreiber reports:

Since then, there have been alarming media reports of people with disabilities applying for assisted death because they experienced poverty and had no viable options for living, a situation disability groups had been warning about for years. Studies have repeatedly shown that some MAID applicants are driven by squalid conditions in long-term-care homes, homelessness, lack of access to appropriate care, and insufficient disability welfare. During AMAD committee hearings, some disabled activists, doctors, and nurses said they had personally seen people apply for assisted death due to material privation and insufficient access to health care. It is sometimes the case that even if those applicants are approved for MAID based on their physical health, it may be their lack of financial and health care support that drives them toward this option.

But representatives associated with the MAID lobby continued to argue that access to assisted death for anyone with a chronic or terminal medical condition is an essential liberal right, and that excluding people from MAID eligibility on the basis that their deaths were not foreseeable was discriminatory. Dying with Dignity Canada’s website includes a post that lists myths and facts about MAID; the allegation that vulnerable people are eligible for MAID on the basis of insufficient social and financial supports is listed as a myth. Below it is a listed “fact”: “Suffering from a lack of social supports does not qualify a person for MAID. No one can receive MAID on the basis of inadequate housing, disability supports, or home care.” This is, strictly speaking, true, but many disabled people have testified that while their disability makes them eligible for MAID, their reason for acting on this eligibility is poverty.

DWD Canada claims that there is no evidence that (MAiD) euthanasia has been provided disproportionately and yet Schreiber reports:

A recent Al Jazeera Fault Lines documentary tells the story of forty-one-year-old Rosina Kamis, who taught statistics at a university. Diagnosed with fibromyalgia in her twenties, she eventually had to stop working and began relying on government support. “I can’t believe it’s so easy for me to get MAID,” she wrote in an email that appears in the documentary. In another email to a friend, she confides that “the suffering I experience is mental suffering not physical.” She explains in the email that part of the reason for her application was her exhaustion related to the health care that she needed, her poverty, and her feelings of isolation. “I think if more people cared about me I might be able to handle the suffering.” Kamis died by MAID in September 2021.

DWD Canada has worked to change the perception and meaning of palliative care. Schreiber explains:

The thinking goes that patients with chronic or terminal conditions still have the option to receive care that enhances their quality of life, thus alleviating their suffering, until they die a natural death; those who can no longer bear their agony can choose to turn to MAID. This framing has led to a perception that MAID is an offshoot of palliative care. But research the Canadian Society of Palliative Care Physicians (CSPCP) carried out in 2015 found that palliative care could not be reliably depended on as a safeguard for MAID because it was underfunded and underresourced. At the time, nearly 80 percent of Canadians in urban areas had access to palliative care; that figure fell to about 35 percent in some rural and remote areas. The CSPCP expressed concern that Canada did not have sufficient social infrastructure in place for MAID to be legalized safely. (A 2023 report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information found that while the number of people accessing palliative care has risen in recent years, “there are still signs of poor-quality palliative care, including people not getting palliative care until just before they die.”)

In 2015, Susan MacDonald, then president of the CSPCP, told Canadian Medical Association Journal that medically assisted death should not be classified under palliative care. Her concern was that ending life was in contradiction with the philosophy and practices of palliative care, the purpose of which is enhancing care for patients.

Leonie Herx

Schreiber interviews Leonie Herx, a palliative care practitioner and professor of medicine at Queen’s University who said:

“Lobby groups like Dying with Dignity [Canada] get these very loud spokespeople who are representing a very different view to the vast majority of palliative care clinicians and [use] that in their marketing strategies,” says Herx. Dozens of Dying with Dignity Canada’s webinars include guest interviews with palliative care physicians and nurses who express the view that offering MAID is part of palliative care. One consequence of this apparent integration is that some practitioners are noticing more hesitancy among patients to seek out palliative treatment because they are worried they will be offered MAID.

Meanwhile, some palliative care professionals feel increasingly ignored by the government. While appearing before the AMAD committee, Long split her five-minute testimony with former Canadian senator James Cowan, who retired from the Senate in 2017. But neither of the two national Canadian palliative care organizations was invited to speak.

I am convinced that DWD Canada lobbying has led to provincial governments forcing palliative care institutions to provide euthanasia.

Funding for DWD Canada has grown significantly with corporate donations and government grants. Schreiber reports:

Some of the lobby organization’s donors have included TD Canada Trust, Rogers, Google Ads, Mackenzie Investments, Telus, Sun Life Financial, RBC, and Pfizer. (Pfizer also makes three of the drugs recommended by the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers to facilitate MAID.) As a charitable organization, it received $222,077 in government assistance in 2020 and $204,655 in 2021, according to Charity Intelligence Canada. The Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers (CAMAP), an organization founded by a member of Dying with Dignity Canada’s advisory council, received $3.3 million for the development of MAID training modules. In 2022, the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto appointed a Bresver family chair in end-of-life care and medical assistance in dying, a new departmental role addressing both palliative care and MAID. The position was financed by a $1 million donation from Barbara Bresver, director-at-large of the GTA chapter of Dying with Dignity Canada.

Money buys influence as Schreiber reports:

By virtue of its financial resources, Dying with Dignity Canada has a higher degree of access to politicians than most palliative care workers or activists are able to get. It works with prominent PR firms such as Blackbird Strategies and, previously, Impact Public Affairs. From 2022/23, representatives of Dying with Dignity Canada have registered thirty-five pre-arranged oral meetings with politicians in Ottawa to discuss topics such as expanding eligibility for MAID.

Schreiber concludes the article by reporting how DWD Canada claims to represent marginal communities “through the lens of diversity, anti-racism and anti-oppression.” But disability advocate, Mitchell Tremblay explains the reality. Schreiber writes:

Meanwhile, Dying with Dignity Canada has responded to questions from disabled advocates with statements that are “very pro-MAID while dismissing the negative effects,” says Mitchell Tremblay, a disability advocate and host of The #Pwdcast. (He also appears in the Fault Lines documentary.) He says he talks to people every day who feel coerced into applying for MAID because it has become one of the only ways to escape poverty, homelessness, bad treatment from landlords, and the feeling that the government doesn’t care about them. “We want safeguards, proper mental health, addiction, and housing support,” says Tremblay. “So that MAID isn’t the better option for so many.”

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition has a large base of financial supporters. Some of our donors are making very generous donations, and we thank you for your support.

More articles on this topic:

• Euthanasia is being forced on Montreal palliative care home (Link).
• Euthanasia lobby pressures BC government to force Catholic hospitals to provide euthanasia (Link). 
• British Columbia government to build euthanasia center next to Catholic hospital (Link).
• Canada: How Death Care is pushing out Health Care (Link).
• The reality of medical assistance in dying in Canada (Link).

Canadian woman with anorexia wants to die by euthanasia

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Anna Mehler Paperny wrote an article for Reuters, published on July 15, examining Canada's March 2024 expansion of euthanasia to include mental illness. Paperny examined the issue based on the story of Lisa Pauli, a 47 year-old woman who lives with anorexia. Pauli, who says that she has struggled with her eating disorder since the age of 8, said:

"Every day is hell," she said. "I'm so tired. I'm done. I've tried everything. I feel like I've lived my life."

Pauli does not currently qualify for MAiD (euthanasia) but in March 2024 Canadians whose sole underlying condition is mental illness, will qualify for euthanasia. Paperny states that Canada will have one of the most expansive euthanasia laws in the world.

Canada's Justice Minister, David Lametti told Paperny that:

"We have gotten where we are through a number of very prudent steps,"

"It's been a slow and careful evolution. And I'm proud of that."

Paperny stated that in 2022 there were 15 Québec euthanasia cases that were outside of the law and there were 19 cases in British Columbia since 2018.*

David Lametti

Lametti believes that Canada's euthanasia law does not go far enough.

Lametti told Paperny that the federal government is considering recommendations from a parliamentary committee to allow euthanasia by advance requests and for "mature minors" - people under 18 deemed capable of making this decision.

When asked about the cases of people with disabilities who are living in poverty, homeless or having difficulty receiving medical treatment Lametti said:

But "you can't get MAID simply because you're having some social challenges or economic challenges. ... Unless they fall into the medical criteria, they can't access."

Lametti ignores the fact that people qualify for MAiD (euthanasia) based on their medical condition (disability) but they are not seeking death because of their disability but because of their social, medical and economic challenges.

Dr Sonu Gaind

Sonu Gaind, the Chief of Psychiatry at Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre told Paperny that:

It can be difficult to determine whether a mental illness is truly irremediable, as the law requires, and to differentiate between pathological suicidality and a rational desire to die,

"We don't even understand the biology of most mental illnesses,"

Michelle Hewitt

Michelle Hewitt, co-chair of the advocacy group Disability Without Poverty told Paperny:

"My biggest fear is that we go to this absolute terminal end and people die but we haven't invested time, money, people in putting the things in place that would mean that people don't want to consider"

Hewitt commented on the euthanasia death of Sean Taggert in 2019.

Sean Tagert, with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's disease who opted for medically assisted death in 2019 after he struggled to get 24-hour care.

"He was very clear on what he wanted - more care hours at home - and when he was told he would have to move to a care facility a distance from his family, particularly his young son, he used MAID,"

Paperny completed the article by asking Charles Falconer, a British Labour peer who supports euthanasia, how Canada's experience with euthanasia is affecting the debate in Britain, where euthanasia is not legal. Falconer stated:

"Canada is being used primarily as an argument against us, not an argument in favour,"

"It does in one sense [represent a slippery slope], doesn't it, because it started off with terminal illness and it's ended up with non-terminal illness and mental illness."

Canada's has experienced a slippery slope when it comes to euthanasia. Lisa Pauli's wish to die by euthanasia does not bring assurance that euthanasia for mental illness is ever warrented. Her story is an illustration of a woman who needs good medical and mental health treatment and support, not death.

It is natural that in her condition she would feel "tired of living" but the answer is not death by lethal drugs, but supportive and intensive treatment that is life giving, not death giving.

* The data does not tell the whole story. Canada has a self-reporting system. The doctor or nurse practitioner who approves the death is also the same doctor or nurse practitioner that can carry-out the death and the same doctor or nurse practitioner required to report the death. Self-reporting systems protect the doctors and nurse practitioners who are willing to participate in euthanasia.

Hon. Ed Fast MP speaks on euthanasia for mental health in Canada's parliament

Hon. Ed Fast MP

Hon. Ed Fast (Abbotsford, CPC) 

Moved that Bill C-314, an act to amend the Criminal Code (medical assistance in dying), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

For further information about the Bill C-314 debate in parliament (Article Link).

*Sign our petition supporting Bill C314 (Petition Link).

Hon. Ed Fast MP: 

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to my private member's bill, Bill C-314, the mental health protection act.

In its very essence, this bill is about reaffirming the dignity and worth of each and every human life. It is about recognizing that it is the most vulnerable among us, the disabled and the mentally ill, to whom we owe the greatest duty: to defend and protect their lives and to provide them with every possible opportunity to live life to the fullest.

Medically assisted suicide was legalized in Canada in 2015 by the Supreme Court's Carter decision and later under the Liberal government's Bill C-14. Under this legislation, medical assistance in dying, or MAID, as it is commonly called, was strictly limited to those consenting adults who had an incurable disease that caused enduring, intolerable suffering that could not be alleviated, and where natural death was reasonably foreseeable, which they call the foreseeability test.

At the time, the government and its supportive stakeholders assured Canadians that this was not a slippery slope, where the scope of MAID would continually be expanded to include more and more vulnerable Canadians. However, not surprisingly, in the intervening eight years since the Carter decision, the government has begun to expand Canada's MAID regime to include more and more defenceless Canadians, most particularly those living with disabilities.

In late 2019, a Quebec lower court judge in the Truchon case ruled that the foreseeability test I just mentioned was unconstitutional, requiring Parliament to respond with additional legislation. Sadly, the Liberal government chose not to appeal the Truchon case to the Supreme Court of Canada, presumably because the decision lined up with the Prime Minister's intent to dramatically expand assisted suicide to other vulnerable Canadians. This leaves us with the perverse situation in which the Supreme Court of Canada, the highest court in the country, has never been allowed to opine on whether the reasonable foreseeability test is constitutional.

In any event, the Liberal government responded to Truchon by tabling Bill C-7, which initially eliminated the foreseeability test but expressly excluded mentally ill persons from being caught up in its MAID regime. Here is what the justice minister said at the time:

The fact that there would be risk of ending the life of a person whose symptoms would have improved...is, in part, why we are of the view that it is safest not to permit MAID on the sole basis of mental illness.... There is also ongoing uncertainty and disagreement as to the potential impact on suicide prevention if MAID were made available to this group.

He went on to say:

...there is no consensus among experts on whether and how to proceed with MAID on the basis of mental illness alone. On a question of such importance and with so much uncertainty and expert disagreement, it is incumbent upon us to proceed with caution and prudence.

Those were our justice minister’s views until the unelected Senate suddenly introduced an amendment that expanded MAID to those Canadians whose sole underlying condition is mental illness. Sadly, the justice minister and the government accepted the amendment without protest and, overnight, became zealous proponents of assisted death for the mentally ill. What happened to the caution and prudence the minister was preaching? What about the impact on suicide prevention the minister was so concerned about? What happened to his view that it was safest not to permit MAID on the sole basis of mental illness?

I agree with the Minister of Justice on one thing, which is that, as he has said, this is indeed a complex issue and is deeply personal. It is deeply personal because it involves life, a precious human life.

I would remind the minister and his government that the issue is also profoundly simple; that is, the principle that all life, all human life is precious and worthy of defence and protection, especially for those who do not have the ability to speak for themselves and have no one to speak for them.

One of the primary functions of government is to protect its citizens, to protect life. In fact, the right to life is expressly enshrined in section 7 of our Charter of Rights. Sadly, the government's Bill C-7 fails to protect the lives of our most vulnerable. It removes the critical safeguards that the original euthanasia legislation included in response to the Carter decision. Removing those safeguards will have irreversible consequences for those who suffer from mental illnesses like depression.

What is equally disturbing is that the Liberal government has also signalled its intention to extend the so-called “treatment option” to minor children. That would arguably make Canada the most expansive, most liberal, assisted suicide jurisdiction in the world. Clearly we are on the slippery slope many of us warned about. Canadians have a right to conclude that the Liberal government has gone too far and too fast in its zeal to implement and expand the scope of assisted death.

My bill will reverse this momentum and repeal the government's decision to extend MAID to the mentally ill. It will put a full stop to the expansion of assisted suicide to mentally disordered persons. Let me be clear. My bill does not in any way reverse the rest of Canada’s MAID regime. Assisted death will remain available for those suffering from irremediable, incurable and intolerable illnesses and diseases. My bill is simply focused on reversing the government’s actions in expanding assisted suicide to include the mentally ill. It would arrest Canada’s slide into normalizing assisted death as an alternative treatment option, something so many of us had predicted would happen.

The evidence from mental health experts is very clear. Contrary to what our justice minister is now saying, there is absolutely no consensus in Canada that the mentally ill should be covered by Canada’s medically assisted death regime. In fact, here is what experts and other stakeholders in the mental health community are saying. John Maher, psychiatrist with Canadian Mental Health Association, states that:

Inducement to suicide while simultaneously denying mental health care to two-thirds of Canadians who urgently need it is an unconscionable failing.

Directly undermining suicide prevention efforts is an insidious and ablest perversion of our mental health care duty.

Dr Ramona Coelho

Drs. Ramona Coelho and Catherine Ferrier, co-founders of Physicians Together with Vulnerable Canadian, penned a statement that was endorsed by over 1,000 physicians. This is part of what it said, 

“Given that there is no medical evidence to reliably predict which patients with a mental illness will not get better, MAID for mental illness will end the lives of patients who would have recovered…Medicine …would fail in its mission if it were to deliberately end the lives of patients living with mental illness… Legislators must work towards safeguarding the lives of the most vulnerable including those placed at a greater disadvantage because of mental illness.”

Dr Sonu Gaind

Dr. Sonu Gaind, chief of the Department of Psychiatry at Sunnybrook Hospital, Toronto, stated, 

“The Ministers have provided false reassurances that we can somehow separate people who are suicidal from those who are seeking psychiatric euthanasia. That is simply not true. In my opinion, that is dangerous misinformation coming from our federal Minister of Justice and our federal Minister of Mental Health and Addictions providing a false sense of safety that does not exist.”

Trudo Lemmens

Trudo Lemmens, professor and chair in health law at the University of Toronto, said, 

“I urge Parliament to take very seriously how offering MAID for mental illness deprives disabled persons, particularly those with mental illness, from equal protection against premature death. Persons experiencing mental illness deserve to be protected against premature death by an unreserved focus on ensuring access to all required health care and social support services. Facilitating their death does exactly the opposite.”

Sephora Tang

Finally, Sephora Tang, psychiatrist and assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at University of Ottawa, said, 

“One cannot prevent suicide while at the same time facilitating it. Placing expectations upon mental health professionals to do both undermines the effective delivery of recovery-oriented mental health care. Canadians deserve to live in a country that is committed to safeguarding the right to life and security of every person. Current MAID legislation fails to achieve this overarching social good.”

Even Canada's justice minister has publicly acknowledged the fact that issues such as irremediability, competency and suicidality are not anywhere close to being resolved to justify such a major policy shift in favour of death. Furthermore, medically assisted death flies in the face of the government’s own promotion of suicide prevention programs, including the recent creation of a national 988 suicide hotline.

It cannot be both ways. It cannot claim, as the Liberal government has, that it wants to prevent suicide deaths on the one hand, when it actively promotes assisted suicide for the mentally ill on the other. Over the last eight years, many of us have expressed our concern and expectation that the Carter decision and Bill C-14 would be expanded by future court decisions, and that these decisions would leave more and more vulnerable populations exposed to the reach of medically assisted suicide.

Our concerns were pooh-poohed. We were accused of fearmongering and of misrepresenting the intentions of this Liberal government. Yet, today, the Truchon decision and the travesty of Bill C-7 bear out our concerns. That is why more and more disability groups have set the alarm bells ringing and are vehemently opposing this legislation. They argue that this legislation amounts to a deadly form of discrimination, making it easier for persons with disabilities to die than to live.

We are hearing more and more reports of the poor and homeless approaching food banks to ask for assisted death, not because they are suffering from a grievous illness but because they do not want to go hungry and homeless. The headline in the British magazine The Spectator asked last year, “Why is Canada euthanising the poor?”

The response from some bioethicists appears to be, “Well, why not?” In fact, a new paper by two bioethicists at the University of Toronto makes the case that euthanizing the poor should be socially acceptable. That is indicative of the path on which our country finds itself. It is terrifying.

We also have verified reports of veterans suffering from PTSD who are being counselled by the Liberal government to consider medical assistance in dying rather than being provided with the treatment and supports they need to recover.
These are the vulnerable that the Liberal government promised to protect. Canadians have the right to ask whether this government is exercising the requisite caution and care to avoid unnecessary overreach and ensure that MAID is not abused or misapplied.

Let me conclude. My private member's bill, Bill C-314 gives all of us parliamentarians an opportunity to take a deep breath and reconsider the perilous road we have embarked upon. As I mentioned, my bill simply reverses the expansion of Canada’s assisted death laws to the mentally ill. At the very least, I would ask my colleagues to allow my bill, at second reading, to go to committee where there could be more discussion.

Have we gone too far and too fast with Canada's assisted suicide program? Will we evolve into a culture of death as the preferred option for those who suffer from mental illness or will we choose life?

I implore my colleagues to choose life. I wish them much wisdom as they make that choice.

Euthanasia court decision in Québec was "fixed" from the beginning.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Prime Minister Trudeau with
Justice Minister Lametti.

In her National Post article: Thanks to Trudeau, Canada's death-care system is top of the line, Barbara Kay makes a strong statement that the 2019 Truchon euthanasia Québec court decision was a "fix" from the beginning. Here's what Kay wrote:

This deliberate obfuscation is consistent, however, with the honed tactics of boundary-pushing activists whose Dignity-R-Us rhetoric ... Liberals settled on a winning strategy. Don’t make euthanasia a political plank; do use the courts to keep the expansion ball rolling. The fix was always in for expansion of the death as “reasonably foreseeable” guardrails established by the 2015 Carter decision. Thus, the 2019 Quebec Truchon decision that found Carter’s limits to MAiD access unconstitutional went unchallenged by Quebec and Ottawa, in spite of a flawed trial process.

The trial judge for Truchon, Christine Baudouin, was a lawyer only recently promoted to Superior Court. Her father, retired Court of Appeal judge Jean-Louis Baudouin, a longtime proponent of state-executed euthanasia, wrote several publications urging decriminalization of assistance to suicide. Christine Baudouin shared his views. Her law firm, Heenan Blaikie, had financially supported her father’s advocacy for state-delivered euthanasia.

The lawyer for the titular disabled plaintiff seeking MAiD, Jean Truchon (who admitted in an email to a friend he didn’t really want to die, he only wanted greater assistance to live with dignity, but couldn’t get it) relied on Jean-Louis Beaudoin’s pro-euthanasia publications, which were accepted into evidence by Christine in the trial.

That Christine Baudouin did not recuse herself in such circumstances compromises the decision. The Quebec and Canada attorneys general knew that, but did not appeal the judgment, an appeal they likely would have won. They welcomed it as a springboard to new legislation. As evidence of their satisfaction with Christine’s ruling, Quebec’s A-G gave Truchon’s lawyer a justice award just days after the decision. And rookie judge Christine Beaudoin was elevated by David Lametti to the Quebec Court of Appeal.

Kay then states that her greatest concern is for people with disabilities. Kay continues by outlining the work of Roger Foley from London Ontario:

For years I’ve followed the vicissitudes of — and several times commented on — 48-year-old Roger Foley, who suffers from cerebellar ataxia, a fatal neurological disorder that limits his ability to move his arms and legs. His physical condition has not dimmed his intellect, his passion for life or his meticulously focused disability-rights activism. Supportive details regarding the Truchon decision and other pivotal moments in MAiD’s history can be found on Foley’s website, assisteddying.ca. I particularly recommend his well-crafted “public-interest evidence video,” instructive as to the rather incestuous relationships amongst euthanasia ideologues, their justice-system enablers, political foot soldiers and the highly supportive Trudeau Foundation.

Kay then explains how Canada's euthanasia directly affects the disability community. She writes:

In 2019, Justin Trudeau promised Canadians they wouldn’t have to choose MAiD because “you’re not getting the supports and cares (sic) that you actually need.” But Catalina Devandas Aguilar, a lawyer from Costa Rica and the UN’s first ever Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, who explored Foley’s and other Canadian cases, found that was precisely what is happening. “Persons with disabilities have to initiate very lengthy and onerous legal procedures to get their rights recognized,” Devandas Aguilar said in a report to the Governor General. This visit and the rapporteur’s worthy recommendations apparently sank like a stone.

You can wait five years to see a medical specialist in this country. The disabled can wait forever to see their living-with-dignity rights honoured. But the euthanasia doctor is always there for you. Nobody, including our prime minister, denies Canada’s health-care system is broken. But cheer up: Our death-care system is top of the line.

Previous articles from Barbara Kay: (Link).

Previous articles concerning Roger Foley: (Link).

Government euthanasia committee ignored disability rights group concerns.

By James Schadenberg

On February 16, the disability rights group Inclusion Canada released a press statement in response to the final report of the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying (AMAD). This press release, titled Surprise, Surprise – Harmful Committee Work leads to Harmful Report on MAiD (Link), claims that AMAD did not merely ignore people with disabilities and their allies but that they were disrespected and, in some cases, denied requested accommodations to deliver their testimony.

As Inclusion Canada’s press statement begins:

Inclusion Canada has received and reviewed the final report of the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying (AMAD). It can’t be sugar coated – people with disabilities and their allies were ignored. We asked for equality-preserving changes to the law; MPs and Senators decided they knew better.

This isn’t surprising. People with disabilities were disrespected by committee members. Their lived experience was discredited and dismissed. Many were also denied requested accommodations to deliver their testimony.

Their press statement includes a video to illustrate this point, titled AMAD Responds to Disability Advocates (Link).  

In this video, multiple people with disabilities and people representing those with disabilities explain how euthanasia expansion has harmed those who live with physical and intellectual disabilities, as well as their families and communities. The video then shows Senators and MPs dismissing these concerns, calling them a “moral panic” and “intellectually incoherent” and stating that some witnesses are not “qualified to comment on this.” A clip shows a Liberal MP trying to rush the testimony of a witness. A clip shows a witness stating outright that “there is no evidence that vulnerable people are at risk for MAiD” despite well-documented evidence to the contrary (the names of some of these victims are mentioned at the end of the video).

The press release continues, stating that it’s unsurprising that this committee process resulted in a discriminatory report. As the press release states:

The committee’s final report is a discriminatory disaster.

“It is clear that the members of the AMAD committee made up their mind about expanding MAiD before consulting with the disability community,” says Krista Carr, Executive Vice President of Inclusion Canada, “Committee members failed to heed the numerous warnings and concerns raised by people with disabilities and their allies.”

Minister of Justice David Lametti’s decision to delay the expansion of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) for people with mental illness does not go far enough. The sunset clause must be removed indefinitely and we demand the government roll back the expansion of assisted dying on the basis of disability. Bill C-7 must be repealed.

“Sadly, these recommendations aren’t surprising coming out of this committee process,” says Robin Acton, President of Inclusion Canada, “This report, if implemented, makes people with disabilities even more vulnerable to state-assisted death. This report suggests expanding MAiD to mature minors and by advanced requests, both of which will put people with intellectual disabilities at even greater risk.”

Disability rights organizations are right to call the government out for putting people with disabilities at risk. Canada’s MAiD law has resulted in vulnerable people, many of whom have disabilities or live in poverty, dying by MAiD when they could've otherwise lived if given the proper support.

The press release concludes:

You need look no further than the video above to see how persons with disabilities were treated in this process. We encourage you to reflect on the conduct of Parliamentarians and how the voices of the disability community have been silenced. This committee’s recommendations do not reflect the voices of the very people track two MAiD targets. People with disabilities deserve better.

Further reading:

• The problem with Canada’s MAiD policy (Link)
• Government report recommends euthanasia for children and euthanasia by advanced directive (Link)
• Sign petition: Support Bill C-314 - Stop Euthanasia for Mental Illness (Link)

Canada's Senate only has one week in parliament to pass Bill C-39 and delay euthanasia for mental illness.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Toronto Sun reporter Catherine Lévesque stated that on February 15, the House of Commons unanimously passed Bill C-39, the bill that would delay the implementation of euthanasia for mental illness until March 17, 2024. But Canada's Senate only has one week to also pass C-39.

Lévesque explained:

Time is of the essence, as both houses will not be sitting for the next two weeks and will come back on the week of March 6 before another break week. That means the Senate will only have one sitting week to study and vote on C-39 before the deadline of March 17 2023.

Lévesque reported that Justice Minister David Lametti is confident that the Senate will vote on the bill quickly but it was the Senate that originally amended Bill C-7 to include euthanasia for mental illness.

Lévesque reported that Marc Gold, the government's representative in the Senate stated:

“We are confident that the Senate will complete a final vote on Bill C-39 before March 17.”

Lévesque reported that during the parliamentary debate on Bill C-39:

Lametti said the main objective of C-39 is to give more time to nurses and practitioners to get more training on the issue and to give the government more time to consider a new report from the parliamentary committee looking at extending eligibility of assisted dying.

NDP MP Alistair MacGregor told Lametti at a committee meeting this week that elected officials studying the issue “always felt under the gun” because of the sunset clause expiring and welcomed the one-year extension provided by the new bill.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are clear that they oppose the extension of MAID to people suffering from mental disorders and have another year to try to make this clause disappear.

Speaking in the Commons on Wednesday evening, things got emotional as Liberal MP John McKay spoke about the hurdles of navigating through the health system for 25 years ever since his stepson was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition welcomed Bill C-39 but it is not a victory since it only delays and stops the implementation of euthanasia for mental illness. For the sake of John McKay's stepson, euthanasia for mental illness should not even be considered.

I do not trust this government. I still fear that Bill C-39 may be held up in the Senate and not meet the March 17 deadline.

Previous article:

• Canada to delay euthanasia for mental illness until March 2024 (Link). 
• Bill C-314 would prohibit euthanasia for mental illness in Canada (Link).
  

Justice Minister best to drop euthanasia for mental illness.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

One sign that Canada's euthanasia debate has changed for the better is the recent opinion columns published by the Toronto Star. The Toronto Star has been one of the most prolific promoters of euthanasia.

On February 7, The Toronto Star published an article by columnist Andrew Phillips titled: Justice Minister David Lametti best to drop acute mental distress from MAiD eligibility. On October 14, The Toronto Star published Phillips article: Canada is going to far with MAiD.

Phillips states in his recent article that:

The federal government made it official last week: it will take an extra year to “get it right” on extending MAID (a.k.a. doctor-assisted dying) to people suffering solely from mental illness.

The chorus of concern late last year about the rush to make this legal forced the government to slow things down. People all the way from the pro-life right to the social justice left raised a host of questions. We were hearing about more and more cases where sick people were choosing MAID because of poverty, homelessness and other “social suffering.”

So the delay is good as far as it goes. But let’s be clear: the government is still determined to go ahead with allowing people with “irremediable” suffering from psychiatric illness to demand that the state, through a doctor, put them to death. On Sunday, Justice Minister David Lametti was asked on CBC Radio’s “Cross Country Checkup” whether the government might change its mind and he was unambiguous. “No,” he said flatly. “We are not going to go back.”

The government seems to have convinced itself that the courts have tied its hands on this issue, and that MAID must be provided as a matter of right to those in acute distress from mental illness.

It should think again. It may have backed off for the time being only to quiet the critics. But my bet is that another 12 months of study and debate won’t make this issue go away. On the contrary: it will only deepen concern over the impact of extending doctor-assisted death to more and more categories of people. The government should listen and be prepared to change course

Dr Sonu Gaind

Phillips then quotes Dr. Sonu Gaind, chief of psychiatry at Humber River Hospital who stated on the Cross Country Checkup CBC radio show, concerning MAiD for mental illness that:

it’s basically impossible to know in cases of mental illness whether the condition is truly “irremediable,” i.e. cannot be cured or alleviated. The state of the science, he said, is such that “we cannot make these predictions.”

Lametti has been influenced by Jocelyn Downie and the euthanasia lobby who argue that euthanasia for mental illness must be permitted. The euthanasia lobby also claims there is a "right to euthanasia." Both assertions are wrong. 

Canada's euthanasia legislation lacks effective definition. Euthanasia can be approved for anyone with an irremediable medical condition and irremediable medical condition is not clearly defined. 

The euthanasia law also states that doctors or nurse practitioners only need to be "of the opinion" that a person fits the criteria of the law. Therefore, once someone is dead, doctors and nurse practitioners cannot be prosecuted, even when it seems obvious that the euthanasia death was atrocious. 

People with mental illness experience similar social issues as people with disabilities, that being poverty, homelessness and an inability to receive medical treatment. Permitting euthanasia for people with mental illness will lead to euthanasia for poverty, euthanasia for homelessness and euthanasia based on an inability to receive medical treatment.

Euthanasia is abandonment not autonomy.

Canada's Ministry of Death

The following article has written by Alexander Raikin been reprinted without edits. This article: Canada's Ministry of Death was published by National Review online and will be published in the National Review print edition on February 20, 2023.

Raikin also wrote the article: No Other Options: An exposé on euthanasia in Canada, that was published in the New Atlantis on December 16, 2022.

By Alexander Raikin

It was supposed to be easy. If journalists asked the Honourable David Lametti, Canada’s minister of justice, a difficult question about euthanasia, he simply needed to read his talking points for February 24, 2020. A senior civil servant from his department prepared the lines; the prime minister’s staffers approved them. All that was left was to kill the messenger.

Publicly, Lametti said that the rate of change in public attitudes toward euthanasia had surprised even him. Barely five years earlier, prosecutors had called euthanasia “culpable homicide.” Now the government of Canada calls it “MAiD” — Medical Assistance in Dying, or, in other words, killing as medical treatment. Lametti, standing with other cabinet ministers, was to announce a further expansion of MAiD that, as Bill C-7, would come partially into effect in 2021. This March, the two-year sunset clause in that bill expires and the list of acceptable reasons for MAiD will be expanded once again, this time to mental suffering unaccompanied by physical ailment.

I filed a freedom-of-information request to find out what Lametti knew when he introduced the bill. While Lametti, like other cabinet ministers, was told to stress that there is “a consensus” among the public behind the plan, his own notes belie the point.

Some questions were never meant to be answered. Question 43 in the memo: Why did the government of Canada not appeal a lower-court decision in Truchon v. Canada, which, contrary to the government’s earlier promises, will expand euthanasia to people with essentially any chronic illness or disability? The answer, in its tautological beauty, is that “the Government of Canada announced in October 2019 that it would not appeal.” Want to know — Question 37 — how many euthanasia deaths there have been so far? The answer is that there has been “a consistent and gradual increase” as the practice of euthanasia “gains greater comfort and acceptance by Canadians.” No need to worry about any numbers — more is better anyhow.

But the most notable question was the one that was never asked at the press conference. It clearly was more important, as it was on the second page of the talking points. It was the Canadian equivalent of a jeremiad, accusing the government of forsaking some of the most important documents of civil liberties that a card-carrying member of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party could believe in. “Q6: Advocates for persons with disabilities are saying that this Bill violates the equality rights and dignity of persons with disabilities, contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the Liberal Party of Canada’s Disability Equality Statement. Does this Bill put the lives of persons with disabilities at risk as advocates claim?”

The prepared answer was another nonanswer. The government would address “stigma and bias”; it would bring about “a culture change to ensure that the important contributions made to Canada by persons with disabilities are recognized and valued on the [same] basis as those of other Canadians.” What the government would not do is slow down a program that offers suicide-prevention services to most people but assisted suicide and euthanasia only to the disabled, terminally ill or not.

Behind the scenes, even on the day of the cabinet minister’s press conference, bureaucrats from the central agencies who had worked on the memo worried about the toll of the government’s policies. One email talked about how “from a comms perspective, I wonder if it might seem like the increase [in MAiD deaths] is buried if it isn’t there and others will report on it rather than the Govt.” The increase wasn’t included in the accompanying media deck, and the media didn’t report on it, not really.

Since Trudeau was elected in 2015, his government has single-handedly created the largest, most permissive euthanasia program in the world. “You can kinda yell till you’re blue in the face that there are problems, but people aren’t listening,” John Maher, a psychiatrist in Ontario specializing in treatment-resistant mental illnesses, told me. When MAiD was first implemented, in 2016, a CBC article claimed that 90 percent of requests for assisted deaths were being refused in Toronto. But by 2021, only 4 percent of requests were deemed ineligible nationwide. “There isn’t a slippery slope,” said Timothy Stainton, a professor of social work at the University of British Columbia. “This is Mount Everest in a snowstorm.”

The daily death toll is staggering, even more so because it is unreported. Every day in Canada, in 2021, more than 27 people died by the hands of their physicians or nurses. It’s double the suicide rate, and there isn’t any sign of its stopping or slowing down. The world’s “euthanasia capital” is no longer Brussels or Amsterdam. It is now Ottawa. Canada euthanizes more people than any other country in the world — and its death toll is growing at a faster rate than that of any other voluntary system of euthanasia anywhere. (So much for Lametti’s description of “gradual increases.”)

To put this in context: When the number of Dutch deaths from euthanasia doubled in six years, a Dutch official in charge of reviewing euthanasia deaths warned that the Dutch model of euthanasia should be avoided. But after Canada’s legalization, the number increased tenfold in six years. At any rate, it will be impossible for any similar Canadian watchdog to warn about Canada. That is because no such watchdogs exist: Unlike in the Netherlands or Belgium, Canada has no mandated review process for potential stories of abuse.

That people with disabilities would be at a unique risk of an early death by MAiD is not an accident, as Lametti’s office knew. In fact, it was predicted well in advance. Before Bill C-7 passed, over 140 disability groups claimed that Trudeau’s plan “put their very lives at risk.” A petition of Indigenous doctors and politicians demanded that it “not be forced on our peoples.” Three United Nations human-rights experts, including the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, decried the legislation as riddled with “ableist assumptions about the inherent . . . ‘worth’ of the life of a person with a disability.” “Under no circumstance should the law provide that it could be a well-reasoned decision for a person with a disabling condition who is not dying to terminate their life with the support of the state,” they wrote. Lametti’s response was to talk about stigma.

How did Canadian institutions become so bullish on euthanasia in the face of such opposition? It’s an important question. A simple answer is that Canada’s descent into death-on-demand is because of its supreme court or its culture. But both explanations seem weak.

It is, of course, fair to say that the court has played an outsized role in creating a “right to die.” In 2015 the Supreme Court of Canada, in Carter v. Canada, unanimously overturned nearly a century and a half of common law to strike down the federal prohibition on “physician-assisted death,” declaring it contrary to the “life, liberty, and security of the person” as guaranteed in Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But the exact same section of the Charter had been used two decades prior to keep medically assisted suicide illegal in the split supreme-court ruling in Rodriguez v. British Columbia that “human life should not be depreciated by allowing life to be taken,” especially by a physician. Why did an already activist court change its mind? Jocelyn Downie, a law professor who was part of the legal team that argued in the Supreme Court for euthanasia to be decriminalized, told me that she is nonetheless “surprised” at the “massive change” that Canadian society — and the courts — had to accept. It couldn’t have happened any sooner.

The court wasn’t responding to any change in law; it was responding to a perceived change in the mood around assisted suicide — conducting a vibe test for euthanasia. “Despite the Court’s decision in Rodriguez, the debate over physician-assisted dying continued,” the court said, arguing the need for it to revisit its earlier ruling, citing failed parliamentary bills in Canada, “recent reports” by Canadian academics, and a changing “legislative landscape” in other jurisdictions such as Colombia and Luxembourg. But this change in mood, as shown by the examples the court cited (which included no polls or surveys), was not the result of some bottom-up change in society.

The culture argument is lackluster too. Earlier attempts to force Canadians to accept euthanasia or assisted suicide as a form of medical treatment failed rather decisively. As late as 2010, a three-quarters majority of the House of Commons wanted to keep physician-assisted death a criminal offense. No major national party supported legalizing euthanasia, which explains why half a dozen bills to introduce euthanasia between 1991 and 2010 failed to pass.

Canadians outside the legislature were unconvinced, too. It’s one thing to support the idea of assisted suicide in the abstract and another to put it into practice. A national 2010 poll by Environics found that if you asked Canadians whether the government should focus on legalizing euthanasia, improving end-of-life care, or both, the response was overwhelmingly (71 percent) for improving end-of-life care. Only 19 percent said euthanasia and 5 percent said both. Two-thirds of Canadians expressed concerns that the elderly would feel pressured to die because of financial concerns, a fear that is already coming true. Although “MAiD providers,” physicians or nurses who perform euthanasia, have long argued that no one is requesting MAiD because of poverty or lack of medical care, I wrote for the New Atlantis that the situation is common enough that the leading organization of MAiD providers held multiple seminars on it. “It is rare for assessors to have patients who have unmet needs, but it does happen. Usually these unmet needs are around loneliness and poverty,” admitted Ellen Wiebe, one of the most prolific “MAiD providers” in Canada.

If it wasn’t the courts and it wasn’t the culture, the answer must lie elsewhere. To understand how we really got here, to promoting the assisted deaths of the most vulnerable people in society and calling it progress, it is necessary to look past Lametti’s talk about a supposed “consensus” and see a multimillion-dollar PR campaign to persuade the public and elites to stop worrying and love MAiD.

The signs of its success are visible to the naked eye, often in the quick marginalization of dissenters. Yves Robert, the secretary of the Quebec College of Physicians and a previous supporter of assisted dying, warned in 2017 that euthanasia in Canada was turning into “death à la carte.” The warnings were almost self-evident, because of “the paradoxical discourse [by the media and Parliament] that calls for safeguards to avoid abuse, while asking the doctor to act as if there was no abuse.” “Let us take the time to properly reflect before going further,” Robert urged. “There’s no urgency to die.” But five years later there apparently is.

Now the same Quebec College of Physicians has sent another representative — not Yves Robert — to clamor for Parliament to expand euthanasia still further, this time to minors and even babies less than a year old. Just don’t call it “infanticide,” please. (Inclusion Canada, a leading disability-rights group, said in a response that “this isn’t MAiD, it’s murder.”)

The same push is evident in other medical groups. The Canadian Psychiatric Association, under the presidency of Sonu Gaind in 2015–16, explored the potential impacts of suicide contagion through the legalization of euthanasia. Yet the following leadership squashed any further “evidence-based study” of contagion risks — and then issued a public statement on behalf of the organization saying that it would be “discrimination” if patients who applied for MAiD because of a psychiatric condition were treated any differently from those with a physical illness. But what the leadership believes is not what the group’s members believe. Ontario psychiatrists, according to an internal survey conducted by the Ontario Medical Association Section on Psychiatry, opposed by a nearly three-to-one margin (63 percent to 23 percent) the proposition that “patients with [only] a psychiatric illness . . . should have available the same options regarding MAiD as available to all patients,” without issues of irremediability in mental illness having been examined.

The impact of this pseudo-consensus is evident in news reports: People are getting desensitized. A completely routine caption from a local newspaper last year was “Randy Obenauer, 74, cries as he tries to clean his own catheter.” When Randy’s friend tried to get him help, local health authorities asked him whether Randy was interested in MAiD instead. But the story didn’t go viral. No one was reprimanded for asking such a callous question. Disability groups added another name to their growing “List of Cases of Concern,” and otherwise life went on.

The national media prefer to report, for instance, on how an Ontario police officer donated his lungs from a euthanasia performed at home, a world first, or how a couple married for 73 years could die together through MAiD at home even though only one of them had a terminal illness. The moral nuances were not discussed; the bias was not new. When it came time for the 2015 election, shortly after the Carter decision, the only person with visible disabilities who was chosen by the journalist moderators to ask a question in the election debate between Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau assumed that a right to die was owed to disabled persons and asked the candidates how their platforms would grant it. This “showed the media complicity” and “the political complicity” in pushing assisted suicide, remarked a matter-of-fact Amy Hasbrouck, the director of Toujours Vivant–Not Dead Yet, a grass-roots disability advocacy group against euthanasia.

International media are not much better. Justin Trudeau’s government is frequently described without any mention of his policy on euthanasia. Until 2021 — years into Canada’s headfirst descent into euthanasia — virtually no major media mentioned MAiD when discussing Trudeau. Instead, the media were seized by “Trudeaumania.” Trudeau was on the cover of Rolling Stone, Attitude (“an international LGBT magazine”), GQ (don’t ask), and even Sky Delta (“Delta Airlines’ popular in-flight magazine”). Just months before Lametti’s press conference, the Atlantic described Trudeau’s government as “the most successful progressive government in the world.”

In every interview that I did with disability advocates or physicians skeptical of euthanasia-on-demand, I asked why they thought euthanasia in Canada had become such an industry. The answer was always the same: “Dying with Dignity Canada,” said one insider who wished not to be named, referring to the largest pro-euthanasia lobbying group, founded in 1980. “I mean, they haven’t come up in all of this, but they’re a very, very powerful, well-funded lobby.”

It was, indeed, Dying with Dignity Canada (DWDC) that created and marketed the public and lobbying campaign for euthanasia, largely through stories of individuals demanding to die. It was highly effective. Whenever parliamentary committees would debate safeguards for MAiD, the organization would arrange for a chosen cadre of individuals to testify in front of the committee; they only needed one activist to balance out the concerns of disability groups, despite the latter’s near-unanimity in opposition to MAiD. Moreover, DWDC could spend millions on promoting a single story online and in the media. There were many groups opposing MAiD, but there was only one national group in support of it. And they were always on script.

Disability advocacy groups couldn’t compete with the slick media campaign featuring almost nothing but white women with terminal illnesses clamoring for suicide (so much for Canadian multiculturalism). It’s the motte-and-bailey rhetorical strategy: Canadians, like Americans, largely support assisted suicide for terminal illnesses, so those were the stories that advocates shared. But the policy of euthanasia was expanding far beyond terminal illnesses: People were dying from hearing or vision loss; treatable illnesses; diabetes or arthritis; loneliness, poverty, old age. Their stories were not told.

Harper Schipper, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, told me that after Rodriguez, Death with Dignity Canada was run in a way that was “absolutely brilliant strategically.” He knows this because he believes he was on the receiving end. In the opening session of the Council of Canadian Academies’ panels on MAiD, it was announced that he would chair an important panel. The event was sequestered and barred to the media in order to maintain the integrity of the proceedings; the panelists were told not to reflect on the proceedings publicly until after the panels’ conclusion. But as Schipper’s panel convened the next day, a coordinated campaign created negative publicity about him. Even before his appointment was announced, a “gotcha” article came out impugning Schipper’s objectivity by noting that he had warned that a slippery slope in euthanasia could lead to a replay of Nazi Germany. It was an open secret on who pulled it off.

“I am called out of the meeting,” Schipper recalls, “because Dying with Dignity has found a reporter, a stringer for the Globe and Mail who writes a piece basically saying Dr. Schipper is a shrill opponent of assisted dying. He’s been named chairman of this group. And while we’re not asking him to step down, we asked that he be fair in his chairmanship. And at the same time, two voices pop up in the Commons, making the same kind of comments.” Ultimately, he was forced to resign from his chairmanship

DWDC’s media savvy isn’t a surprise: Its first major donor was a media mogul, Moses Znaimer. In 2008, Znaimer set his sights on seniors. He created a for-profit company, ZoomerMedia, which he used to buy outright the CARP (Canadian Association of Retired Persons) magazine. Then he leveraged this financial partnership into becoming the president of CARP’s board.

The maneuver was strategic. When the longtime executive vice president of CARP, Susan Eng, said that she had a neutral position on euthanasia — neither supporting nor criticizing it — Znaimer fired her. Her replacement was the former CEO of Dying with Dignity Canada. “The only reason he fired me,” Eng has said, “was so that they can put out an official position for CARP saying that they want to insist on assisted dying on demand.” Znaimer also used his position to hire at least four pro-euthanasia lobbyists and arranged a personal meeting with David Lametti to persuade the government to expand assisted suicide further.

In 2010, DWDC raised just $90,000 and, according to a civil discrimination suit, was on a path to bankruptcy. Yet it continued to spend so much on lobbying, public relations, and other forms of activism that in 2015 the Canada Revenue Agency (Canada’s IRS) stripped it of its charity status. DWDC was then revitalized by big donors. A $7.75 million bequest from a supporter who had died through MAiD, and another bequest of $500,000, transformed the organization’s capacities in 2018. It could now do so much more.

Canada has another pro-dying group, one specifically geared to physicians: CAMAP, the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers. Its purpose, its president Stefanie Green told me, is to be “the support for people that do the work.” I’ve written before in the New Atlantis on how CAMAP has kept hidden from the public and the Parliament stories of MAiD’s being offered as an alternative to poverty and inferior medical care. We know little about CAMAP except that it was founded shortly after the Carter decision. In 2021, CAMAP became a registered charity, revealing some curiosities in its financing. Unlike most charities, it spent $0 on fundraising, yet it had an astonishing $780,000 in near-liquid capital in the bank. Where did this money come from? It’s unclear. But much of CAMAP’s resources, training briefs, and studies show that its activities are funded by Dying with Dignity Canada.

Sometimes CAMAP crosses the line into activism. Green told me (and Parliament) that her organization does not advocate for any position on MAiD, but rather that CAMAP impartially reports what is happening on “the front line” to interested parties. But in a seminar, Aaron McKim, a MAiD provider in Newfoundland, hinted at actions that MAiD providers take to counteract other professional associations. “Our nursing association and social-work association have both put out practice advisories that their members aren’t really supposed to even bring up MAiD unless the patient specifically asks about it,” said McKim in a CAMAP seminar on “lack of resources” in May 2021. “And so we’re, we’re trying to kind of figure out ways to counteract that.”

“It’s clear that people associated with Dying with Dignity have been unusually influential in the policy-making in Canada related to [MAiD],” Trudo Lemmens, a law professor from the University of Toronto, told me. “It contrasts sharply with how disability-rights organizations and Indigenous organizations have been ignored in this debate.” Heidi Janz, a disability scholar and activist, said in an email interview with me that “proponents of the so-called ‘right to die’ and the federal Liberals — who are often one and the same — have consistently framed the expansion of eligibility for MAiD as advancing the autonomy rights of people with disabilities, but this claim is blatantly false.”

Lobbying records indicate that Lemmens and Janz are right. Dying with Dignity Canada has met ten times with staffers for the Ministry of Justice, including once with David Lametti himself. Every senator but one that their lobbyists spoke to was appointed by Justin Trudeau. Every vote to pass and then amend MAiD succeeded because of Liberal members. There are no records that David Lametti met with any lobbyists from disability groups.

The connection between DWDC and the Liberal Party is now even familial. James Cowan, the former leader of the Independent Liberal senators who made possible the passage of the first MAiD legislation in the Canadian senate, is now in political retirement as chairman of the board of DWDC. His daughter is Suzanne Cowan, the president of the Liberal Party.

In sum, euthanasia advocates dominated the political and media conversation and have finally come to control the expert panels and their power of imprimatur. The experts now chosen are able de facto to shape euthanasia policy as they wish while giving the Trudeau government a veneer of supposed scientific legitimacy (as if medical expertise were sufficient to resolve what is at root an ethical question). The most recent example was the expert panel formed to study safeguards for euthanasia in cases of mental illness. The panel reported that current safeguards around MAiD work well and recommended no additions. Unsurprisingly, the chairperson of that panel was an enthusiastic MAiD supporter and others had already argued for the expansion of MAiD to mental illnesses. Two board members resigned in protest, but the needed conclusion was reached.

It has been a proven strategy from the beginning of the euthanasia boom. When the Royal Society of Canada issued a report in 2011 on “end-of-life decision-making,” the chosen “expert panel” included only supporters of euthanasia. It wasn’t even subtle: The chairman publicly wrote his thoughts on the topic beforehand, while two other commissioners had published books that argued for the legalization of permissive euthanasia. The panel of course reached the desired conclusion. It was even more unsubtle that the panel thanked Peter Singer for editing the philosophical section that justified euthanasia. (Singer is a philosopher who argued in Practical Ethics [1979] that it is moral to kill “defective infants.”) When the time came for the Supreme Court to revisit the legality of euthanasia in 2015, it cited this report as proof that Western mores around death were changing.

At some point, historians or judges will lay blame for all the lives thrown away. Many major institutions in Canada will bear responsibility: the Supreme Court for failing to abide by its precedent in Rodriguez protecting the right to life; political leaders, for failing to safeguard the same right; the medical system, for failing to see people with disabilities as people with lives worth living; and the media, for failing to cover the debate with objectivity. What they should not blame is “a consensus.” There never was one.