Canada's euthanasia law was no slippery slope; it was a cliff.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Yuan Yi Zhu

An article by Yuan Yi Zhu, a Canadian academic, that was published as a Special to the National Post on February 18, 2025 explains that 10 years after the Supreme Court of Canada Carter decision (that legalized assisted death in Canada) that Canada's MAiD law was not a slippery slope; it was a cliff. 

Zhu writes that the Supreme Court of Canada Carter decision claimed that no slippery slop would happen, which is exactly the opposite of what has happened. Zhu wrote:

February marks the 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General), in which the court unanimously ruled, against both basic logic and its own precedents, that the right to life, guaranteed by the Constitution, included the right to a state-assisted suicide through what came to be known euphemistically as “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD).

At the time, the court dismissed evidence from other jurisdictions that the legalization of euthanasia inevitably led to its open-ended expansion as well as abuse against the vulnerable. Belgium’s disastrous euthanasia experiment, which saw children and people with psychiatric disorders dying at the hands of doctors, was, the court said, the “product of a very different medico-legal culture…. We should not lightly assume that the regulatory regime will function defectively, nor should we assume that other criminal sanctions against the taking of lives will prove impotent against abuse.” There would be no slippery slope, the court promised us.

Zhu examines his assertions about Canada's euthanasia law.

In 2016, Parliament legalized MAiD for people whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable.” A short five years later, unnoticed in the midst of the pandemic, Canada’s euthanasia regime was expanded to cover those with chronic conditions whose deaths were not imminent. At the same time, Parliament legalized euthanasia for mental illness alone to come into force in 2023 (it has since been postponed to 2027), making a mockery of our society’s commitment to mental health and suicide prevention.

Christine Gauthier

Zhu examines several of Canada's euthanasia horror stories, such as Paralympian, Chritine Gauthier:

The horror stories Canada’s euthanasia regime has generated — the Paralympian who was offered MAiD by a government employee when she asked for a wheelchair ramp, the disabled woman living on welfare who opted for MAiD because she could not secure adequate housing, the cancer patient who chose to kill himself because he could not access chemotherapy in time — have become so commonplace that they have blunted our sense of decency, of what is the minimum we owe to our fellow citizens. Meekly, we have accepted that such horrors, and many more unreported ones, are part and parcel of Canadian society.

We have no answers to the contradictions raised by the legalization of MAiD. The civil servant who suggested it to Christine Gauthier was fired; but why did she lose her job, when MAiD is healthcare and when Gauthier, who is confined to a wheelchair, is eligible for euthanasia under Canadian law because of her disability? Was she not simply doing her job, providing information to those who may need it?

Zhu then comments on Canada's euthanasia statistics:

When it was introduced, proponents claimed MAiD would only account for a small number of deaths. In 2023, almost one death out of 20 in Canada was due to MAiD. In Quebec, which has adopted the practice more enthusiastically than virtually any other human society, the figure is 7.3 per cent, the highest such figure anywhere in the world. Last year, Quebec unilaterally legalized MAiD by advance directive — which under the Criminal Code is murder. The federal government’s reaction was to hold a series of national roundtables to discuss the idea more.

What about the “regulatory regime” on which the learned judges of the Supreme Court rested their hopes to protect the vulnerable? In Ontario, the chief coroner’s office recorded at least 428 cases of non-compliance with Canadian law by MAiD providers over a five-year period, in what was described as “a pattern of not following legislation, a pattern of not following regulation.” Most cases led to nothing more than an email to the provider; only four cases were referred to professional regulators. Not a single law-breaker was referred to the police.

Jocelyn Downie

To confirm how Canada's euthanasia law is being widely interpreted, Zhu refers to comments by Canada's leading euthanasia academic:

In the words of Jocelyn Downie, who received the Order of Canada for her promotion of MAiD, when doctors or nurse practitioners are assessing a patient’s eligibility for MAiD, “you can ask as many clinicians as you want or need” for a second opinion, allowing them to shop around until they find a colleague who will sign off on a MAiD request. On another occasion, she told medical professionals that, when it came to signing off on MAiD requests, “There is no certainty or unanimity required. There is not perfection required.” Legally, she was right: Canadian law does not require medical professionals to be right when they authorize MAiD for someone; they must merely have reasonable belief. The MAiD assessor does not even need to meet the patient face-to-face: a Zoom meeting is sufficient.

Finally Zhu refers to the role of the courts in Canada's euthanasia horror:

As for the courts, which opened a Pandora’s box, they have largely washed their hands from it all. Last year, an Alberta judge ruled that an autistic woman with no apparent diagnosis of a physical illness could receive MAiD, even though the judge himself did not understand how she came to be approved for MAiD and even though at least one doctor had turned down her request.

Some judges are even proud of the role they played in ushering in MAiD: in 2018, Richard Wagner, the chief justice of Canada, agreed the Carter decision and other rulings of its kind made the Supreme Court, as one Vancouver lawyer had characterized, “the most progressive in the world,” and added that he was “very proud of that.”

A decade on, there was no slippery slope; it was a cliff. 

Recent articles on this topic:

• Canada euthanasia: Unmasking healthcare and social failures (Link).
• Euthanasia is a national tragedy and it's only getting worse (Link).
• Family sues after British Columbia man dies by euthanasia while on a psychiatric day pass (Link).
• Canada: 13,343 reported euthanasia deaths in 2023 (Link).
• Ontario: At least 428 non-compliant euthanasia deaths (Link).
  

Insight into The Cautionary Tale of Canada's Euthanasia Regime

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Alexander Raikin

On October 9, 2024, The European Conservative published an interview by Jonathon Van Maren with Alexander Raikin. Raikin has recently published a research article titled: The Rise of Euthanasia in Canada: From Exceptional to Routine.

First question: In your view, why did Canada’s euthanasia regime go off the rails much sooner than other jurisdictions that have legalized euthanasia/assisted suicide? Raikin Responds:

The premise of your question is interesting. When the Supreme Court of Canada decriminalized euthanasia, it was based on the argument of a right to life—that those who would die from euthanasia would have otherwise died from suicide. It was a lesser evil. Yet every day in 2022, on average, Canadian physicians and nurses ended the lives of more than 36 people. It is now quadruple the official suicide rate.

In an ordinary country, in an ordinary time, this would be considered a national crisis: a royal commission would be called and weekly press conferences by worried government officials would dominate the news cycle, especially if the victims were all people with disabilities and the elderly. Instead, we now have cognitive dissonance of a national variety. News media credulously write about the horror of a Canadian man selling suicide kits online—and then report almost monthly on how a state-sanctioned, state-funded, and state-administered death from euthanasia is “beautiful.” Or how the lethal injection of prisoners in the U.S. is cruel and unusual, unless a prisoner denied for parole in Canada asks for a lethal injection instead.

This dissonance is reflected in what our public healthcare system funds. The median wait time for a CT scan in Canada was 66 days in 2023. A government-funded suicide, meanwhile? Only 11 days in 2022. I don’t know any elective medical procedure in Canada that is as rushed as euthanasia.

Canada is, of course, not the only jurisdiction with horror stories of what happens when we selectively decriminalize murder and assisted suicide by physicians and nurses. Every jurisdiction that has legalized permissive euthanasia or assisted suicide has seen wrongful deaths that shouldn’t have happened. It is as true in the Netherlands and Belgium as it is in Switzerland or Oregon. I could spend the rest of my life counting these cases: consider, for instance, the dozens of reported cases of euthanasia based on autism or an eating disorder that sparked some worldwide interest. The Swiss Medical Association had to issue a statement that suicide “for healthy persons is not medically and ethically justifiable.” Yet, even in a limited assisted suicide program which requires a terminal diagnosis with less than six months of natural life, we have seen the same excesses. In Washington state, according to the physicians responsible for ending their patients’ lives, 10% of all assisted suicides in 2022 were because their patients were concerned with “financial implications of treatment.” Not one media account reported on it.

But Canada surpasses all these jurisdictions, at least in how quickly we’ve seen the same stories. It was in the first hundred cases of euthanasia in Ontario, for instance, that we saw anorexia as a qualifying condition for euthanasia. Not a single newspaper reported on that either. There is no innate reason for why Canada’s euthanasia program has turned to be such a catastrophic failure in terms of human rights, especially for the people that the Supreme Court of Canada described as “vulnerable persons” who must be protected. On paper, Canada should have one of the strictest euthanasia programs in the world: the eligibility criteria and the safeguards are written as exemptions—in the Criminal Code—from homicide and aiding suicide. If a physician or a nurse practitioner breaks any provision, they would not be protected by these exemptions and could therefore face up to 14 years in prison. That hasn’t happened.

I have some speculations about why Canada’s euthanasia program has turned into a global canary in the coal mine for permissive euthanasia. It’s not because physicians or nurses in Canada are any more diabolical than in other jurisdictions—the vast majority have no interest in killing their patients, even as it becomes a surefire route for a promotion and a leadership position. The irony, of course, is that the exact physicians you don’t want to be involved in ending their patients’ lives are those who are most interested to do so.

I think the more likely reason is because of how Canada was forced to decriminalize euthanasia by the courts. Leon Kass warned that a ‘right to die’ invariably becomes a ‘duty to die.’ Once the Supreme Court of Canada enshrined this right much more forcefully than in other jurisdictions, the Criminal Code protections became moot—the relationship between physicians and their patients were ruptured. If it is a legal right to die, then there is no purpose for anyone else to be involved in this decision, even if it is a cop or a judge. No one else is in that room. It means that a physician and a nurse—who self-selected to reject their roles as healers—can break as many rules as they want, or pressure their patients to die from euthanasia.

It’s not a direct pressure, of course. It is more subtle: if you are suffering, why not be treated by this painless, ‘100% effective’ medical treatment? You are dying anyhow, even if it is a year or four decades from now, and other medical treatments are months away. Why not die? You feel in any rate like a burden to society, to your family, and to me, your caregiver. That is not a hypothetical: according to ‘MAID providers’ (their preferred description), over a third of their patients expressed that as at least one of their reasons to die.

Question 2: Your reporting has uncovered many disturbing aspects of Canada’s MAID system. What are some aspects of the way MAID has been implemented that would (or should) shock people?

Let’s start with something I found today. The Government of Canada created a website to tell physicians and nurse practitioners how to interpret its euthanasia legislation. It states, quite clearly, “Provinces and territories may create further policies and standards with respect to MAID. However, they cannot permit actions that the Criminal Code prohibits.”

Later this month, Quebec is set to unilaterally permit actions that the Criminal Code prohibits—it will allow people to sign an “advanced directive” for a clinician to end their life in the future when they lack the capacity to consent to their death. Let’s be clear what this means: physicians will have to approach a person with dementia, confused and unaware of what is happening, possibly emotional, and then restrain them and end their life. What if these patients changed their mind, maybe regained lucidity for a time, or learned to live a meaningful life with their condition? It wouldn’t matter. It is a murder warrant. One doesn’t have to go as far to read John Locke to know the virtue of why common law has made it so that no one can consent to their own death or harm. The idea that this can ever be made ‘safe’ is wrong.

Yet the truth of the matter is that Canada has already and quietly allowed a version of this. For National Review, I wrote a cover story last year about how Canada removed the requirement for final consent before a death from euthanasia, if a patient enters in a written agreement with one of their two MAID assessors. The form doesn’t need to be signed, and no one else needs to know about it. The exception is that, if a patient shows any verbal or physical signs of “refusal or resistance” to their death, then the euthanasia cannot proceed. MAID providers found and laughed about a loophole instead: they first sedated the patient who “is now delirious, shouting, pulling their arm away as one tries to insert the IV to provide MAID.” There can be no resistance for euthanasia if the patient is first sedated. These physicians then discussed with a bioethicist on the value of having this procedure potentially done away from the family of the deceased, because it would otherwise be distressful.

There are too many stories of abuse in Canada’s MAID program. I wrote about a suicide attempt that failed and then was ‘completed’ through MAID, even though a prominent supporter of MAID believed that it was potentially illegal. I’m writing a story right now on the Criminal Code violations of MAID. But these concerns were known virtually from the beginning of Canada’s euthanasia program. The Office of the Correctional Investigator said, in 2019, “There is no legal or administrative mechanism for ensuring accountability or transparency for MAiD in federal corrections.” Nothing was done. Yet think about what this statement means. It means that the MAID process, in itself, has no legal or administrative mechanisms to keep even the most watched people in our society safe. The federal government has explicitly excluded itself from any oversight role for a policy it created and a criminal law that it is meant to enforce.

Question 3: In your view, why have so many non-religious voices—suicide prevention advocates and disability rights activists—been ignored by the government and groups like Dying With Dignity?

Well, that the government ignores certain groups is not exactly controversial. But I think these groups are ignored not just because they lack a large lobbying purse or political power.

My theory—and I would prefer if I were wrong—is because these non-religious groups sound too much like religious groups. They both rely on an unprovable and therefore uncontestable notion of equality. Your next question asks me about my views on the lawsuit filed by disability organizations in Canada, which claims that Canada’s euthanasia program for people with disabilities who are not terminally ill is discriminatory and unconstitutional. I was listening to their first press conference last week. Heather Walkus, the National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, Canada’s oldest disability organization, said at the press conference that “CCD will always fight for life.” Fight for life? In 2024? When was the last time that you heard those words from any Canadian or American NGO, let alone a progressive organization—or a religious group nationally in Canada?

Suicide prevention advocates, mental health professionals, disability rights activists: virtually all of them are opposed to the idea that certain lives are less worthy of living. The corollary is that each life has an inherent dignity by virtue of being alive. Call it anti-ableism or a culture of life, imago Dei or article 10 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We either believe that disabilities do not make a person less worthy of dignity and life, no matter how severe or life-altering, or we do not. Either we believe that human life is sacrosanct, or else that it is disposable.

A government that decriminalizes suicide and murder for only some people is fundamentally unjust. If it is true, as argued Lord Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, the late chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, “The value of human life is infinite and beyond measure,” then it logically means that “Any part of life—even if only an hour or a second—is of precisely the same worth as seventy years of it, just as any fraction of infinity, being indivisible, remains infinite.” That certainly doesn’t mean that a person who is dying and in pain must suffer: we have developed, even if we don’t fund it adequately, the most advanced form of palliative care, and dual intent for palliative medicine to treat suffering that shortens life is almost universally accepted in medicine and among faith groups. But to cross that line, to treat a patient’s suffering by ending the patient, is the difference between healthcare and deathcare.

I spoke to someone whose sister died from MAID. She had a non-terminal illness, and should therefore not have been eligible for MAID, at least according to the law at the time (in 2021, Canada expanded euthanasia to non-terminal illnesses and disabilities). He told me that, if his sister would have been on the side of a bridge, he wouldn’t have pushed her. But her MAID assessor believed otherwise. His sister couldn’t find a medical treatment option for her in Canada—besides euthanasia.

Question 4: What is your view of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms challenge filed in Ontario Superior Court by a coalition of disability groups and two affected individuals?

It is the start of litigation. It won’t be the end. If a law values some lives as less worthy of living than other lives—be it on the basis of disability, age, or identity—then that law is unjust. There’s a joke in Futurama of a suicide pod in the future where you must pay a nickel. It’s not a joke in Canada. When I lived in Canada, I needed to pay for my drug prescriptions. But MAID is free, always free. The financial and moral costs are paid for by society.

At this point, we need to put some limits on MAID legislation. Even by disability organizations simply launching a lawsuit, it is enough to say to people with disabilities across Canada that they matter, that their lives are worth living, and that simply having a disability is no good reason for suicide. It was a message that, a decade ago, healthcare practitioners used to say to their patients. Now it is disability organizations that are quite literally collecting names of their dead.

Question 5: How do you see this debate unfolding over the next several years? Can the expansion of the euthanasia regime be stopped?

The year is 1919. A group of scientists and physicians claim that using the scientific method and a rational approach, physicians can objectively decide which people would benefit from sterilization and which would not. About a dozen and a half states in the U.S. enacted this practice against the consent of the individual.

In Canada, it is 1928. Despite eugenics originating in the United Kingdom, the only part of the British Empire that legalized forced sterilization was in Canada. In Alberta, where most of these procedures happened, it was at first voluntary and in front of a four-member panel with at least two physicians. Then, in 1937, consent was no longer required.

The arguments for eugenic sterilization and euthanasia are surprisingly similar, partly because, as Ian Dowbiggin demonstrated in his book A Merciful End, these arguments were made by the same people. In both cases, it was pushed through by physicians who believed they were acting in their patients’ interest. In both cases, an objective rubric was meant to apply to decide which patients would be suitable for treatment and which would not. In both cases, it was supported by large majorities and the cultural elite—for a time.

As a society, we haven’t gotten over the role of eugenics. As long as we treat disabilities as a fate worse than death, we remain in the grasps of this dying ideology. Today, even bringing up eugenics in the context of permissive euthanasia is seen to be impolite (and a cancellable offense, as Dr. Harvey Schipper found when he was forced to step aside from a working group on advance requests—the same issue that Quebec is sliding into this month).

Yet eugenics is a dying ideology, at least outside of X. Those who effectively support it are forced to argue for it indirectly. As one prominent bioethicist and supporter of euthanasia suggested, we need infanticide because some babies become disabled through birth. It is a horrific opinion, one that, as G.K. Chesterton described in his Eugenics and Other Evils, could only be sustained through “terrorism by tenth-rate professors.”

We do not need to vacillate on what is right and wrong. Everyone has a right to life, and the experiment in saving life through legalizing some suicides has been an unequivocal disaster. In a generation, or maybe sooner, we will be speaking of euthanasia the same way that we speak of forced sterilization.

Rosina Kamis

Question 6: In your reporting, what story or stories have stuck with you the most?

Every few months, I think about Rosina Kamis. For my reporting in The New Atlantis, through the executor of her estate, I went through her entire email account and her Google Drive. “I think if more people cared about me,” she wrote in an email, “I might be able to handle the suffering caused by my physical illnesses alone.” To her two dozen subscribers on YouTube, she said, “Sometimes all the pain will go away just by having another human being here.” Even without a terminal illness, she was instead given a state-administered euthanasia—the exact condition that disability organizations in Canada are currently contesting.

The other story that struck me the most is how ghoulish proponents of euthanasia have been in promoting euthanasia for Indigenous people. Indigenous Disability Canada is one of the parties in the Track 2 lawsuit, and I hope they will include some of the evidence that I wrote about in National Review. At the 2018 annual convention for the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers, just two years after legalization of MAID, the physicians and nurses tasked with euthanasia advocated expanding MAID to Indigenous children “because they’re closest to the ancestors.” Even then, MAID providers were surprisingly tolerant of euthanizing “a First Nation patient” whose suffering was exasperated “due to a life lived in poverty.” These MAID providers then suggested that “as soon as a patient tells me their suffering is enough, whether I like it, that is their situation and their context.” Note the answer: try to get their basic needs met, try to fix the system, but above all else, don’t forget to kill a patient suffering from poverty. It’s the only right thing to do, at least in Canada.

Alexander Raikin has been covering Canada’s euthanasia regime for years and has consistently broken stories that other journalists missed (or ignored). His work on euthanasia and assisted suicide has been cited by The Atlantic and the New York Times and has been featured in cover stories for National Review and The New Atlantis.

Euthanasia: Canada's doctors can kill you.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

An article by Nicholas Tomaino that was published by WSJ.com on September 2, 2024 titled: Welcome to Canada, the Doctor Will Kill You Now exposes how Canada legalized euthanasia (MAiD). Tomaino writes:

Canada has undergone a crash course in what the country calls “medical assistance in dying,” or MAID. The experiment began in 2015, when the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in Carter v. Canada that “laws prohibiting physician-assisted dying interfere with the liberty and security” of people with “grievous and irremediable” medical conditions. Parliament codified the decision the following year.

Lawmakers thought they were imposing limits. “We do not wish to promote premature death as a solution to all medical suffering,” then-Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said. The plaintiff’s lead lawyer in Carter argued that “in almost every case,” doctors will want to “help their patients live, not die.” “We know physicians will be reluctant gatekeepers.”

Yet Krauthammer was right. The Superior Court of Quebec soon ruled that MAID was unconstitutional because it required that an applicant’s death from “a grievous and irremediable medical condition” be “reasonably foreseeable.” Parliament amended its “discriminatory” regime in 2021, opening wider the door to facilitated death. The new law dropped safeguards, such as the minimum 10-day assessment period between request and provision. It also proposed mental illness as an eligible condition, the implementation of which the government has delayed until 2027. The message for everyone else remains the same: If you want to die, you needn’t wait.

Tomaino is explaining how Canada legalized euthanasia and makes reference to comments by Charles Krauthammer. The short version is, Canada's Supreme Court, in 2015, struck down Canada's laws that protected people from euthanasia and assisted suicide. Parliament legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide in June 2016 using the term MAiD, Medical Assistance in Dying. In 2019 a Quebec court decision (Truchon) decided that Canada's law was too restrictive because it limited killing to terminally ill people. Parliament then expanded Canada's law in March 2021 by (among other things) removing the terminal illness requirement in the law.

Alexander Raikin

Tomaino continues:

The consequence, Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Alexander Raikin notes in a new study, is that what was meant to be exceptional has become routine. Using two government data sets, he estimates the program is at least the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada, claiming a reported 13,241 lives in 2022, up from 1,018 in 2016.

Mr. Raikin notes the government believed doctors wouldn’t merely rubber-stamp applications. Yet in 2022 more than 81% of petitions resulted in death, including for “vision/hearing loss” and “diabetes.” He documents that the percentage of denied written requests has been falling for years, from 8% in 2019 to 3.5% in 2022, even as the number of applications has increased. The upshot has been that 44,958 people have been put to death between 2016-22. One estimate, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020, predicted that “approximately 2,000 euthanasia” cases could be expected annually. The MAID toll that year was 7,611. Thus “either in absolute numbers or when weighed as a percentage of deaths,” Canada has the “fastest-growing assisted-dying program” in the world.

Roger Foley

Tomaino comments on Roger Foley, a man who has been told by hospital staff that he should die by MAiD

Roger Foley, who suffers from a degenerative neurological disorder, cerebellar ataxia, has witnessed MAID since its infancy. In 2009, as Mr. Foley’s condition worsened, he resigned from his job at the Royal Bank of Canada. After several years in home care, in which he claims he was mistreated, he was placed in a mental-health ward.

“I became extremely suicidal,” Mr. Foley, 48, says in a Zoom interview from his bed in the hospital, where he’s lived since 2016. After he shared those thoughts with staff, he says they began to float the idea of euthanasia. That alarmed him, so he began to record conversations secretly. He later shared them with Canadian journalists.

In one, a hospital ethicist threatens Mr. Foley with denial of insurance coverage and says it would cost him “north of $1,500 a day” to stay in the hospital. When Mr. Foley protested, the ethicist retorted: “Roger, this is not my show. My piece of this was to talk to you about if you had interest in assisted dying.”

He didn’t. “I have a passion to live,” Mr. Foley says. He wants to volunteer and write songs. Many people like to “use the term ‘end suffering,’ ” he says. In practice, that means “Don’t help the sufferer, end the sufferer.”

Canadians were told that euthanasia would only be available as a last resort but in reality it has been normalized and is killing many more people than anyone anticipated.

Canada's Euthanasia lobby launches court case to extend euthanasia to mental illness alone.

Based on the Netherlands where 1.7% of all euthanasia deaths were for mental illness alone, if permitted, there could have been 255 euthanasia deaths for mental illness alone in Canada in 2023.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director,
Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Dying with Dignity, Canada's leading euthanasia lobby group, launched a court case on August 19, 2024 to force Canada to extend euthanasia to mental illness alone. This recent court challenge proves how extreme Canada's euthanasia lobby is and how they have redefined the meaning of the words compassion and equality.

The euthanasia lobby falsely believe that the Supreme Court of Canada, Carter decision (2015), created a right to euthanasia, (which it did not) and that the Carter decision also required Canada to permit euthanasia for mental illness alone (which it did not). 

Stephanie Taylor reported for The Canadian Press that:

An application filed by Dying with Dignity in Ontario Superior Court on Monday argues that it is discriminatory to bar people with mental disorders from being eligible for an assisted death when it is available to people who suffer physically.

The euthanasia lobby has launched a Charter challenge to force Canada to extend euthanasia to people with mental illness alone based on equality. The Dying with Dignity press release states:

The continued exclusion reinforces the stigma and historic prejudice against people with mental illness. It violates section 15 of the Charter by discriminating on the basis of the type of disability experienced. It also violates section 7 of the Charter by denying people with a mental illness the freedom to make fundamental decisions about their body and life; this denial is overbroad. The differential treatment of people whose sole condition is a mental illness minimizes the enduring and intolerable suffering that some individuals experience and undermines their full participation in the range of choices that are available to all other people across Canada.

The Dying with Dignity media release justifies euthanasia for mental illness by stating:

In fact, of the 8,042 assisted deaths in The Netherlands in 2023, 138 (1.7%) were because the primary medical condition was a mental illness.

I have predicted that there were more than 15,000 Canadian assisted deaths in 2023. If Canada approves euthanasia for mental illness alone, based on the Netherlands euthanasia data of 1.7% of all euthanasia deaths were for mental illness alone, there may have been 255 euthanasia deaths (1.7%) for mental illness alone in Canada in 2023.

The reality is that Canadians with mental illness are already being killed by euthanasia, even when their primary purpose for seeking death is a mental illness, so long as the person has a co-morbidity that enables the doctor or nurse practitioner to approve the death.

The issue of euthanasia for mental illness alone has always been part of the euthanasia debate. The original law (Bill C-14) that was passed in June 2016 excluded euthanasia for mental illness alone and it required that a person's "natural death be reasonably foreseeable" (which was not defined). Essentially Bill C-14 required that a person had to have a terminal condition in order to be approved to be killed.

In March 2021, the federal government expanded Canada's euthanasia law by passing Bill C-7. C-7 removed the requirement in the law that a person's "natural death be reasonably foreseeable", it removed the 10-day waiting period for people who were terminally ill, it added a 90-day waiting for people who were not terminally ill and it approved euthanasia for mental illness alone, but added a two year moratorium on euthanasia for mental illness alone to establish guidelines around this new category of killing.

Since then the federal government has twice delayed the implementation of euthanasia for mental illness alone with the most recent legislation (Bill C-62) delaying it until March 17, 2027.

When Canada passed Bill C-7 and eliminated the requirement that a person have a terminal condition to be approved to be killed, the result has been stories of Canadians with disabilities seeking or dying by euthanasia based on poverty, homelessness or an inability to access necessary medical treatments.

Similar to Canadians with disabilities, Canadians living with mental illness are also more likely to live in poverty or homeless and they often have difficulties accessing necessary medical treatments. In some communities, a person with mental illness will wait more than 90 days to be seen by a mental health specialist, and yet the law permits euthanasia for non-terminally ill people with a 90-day waiting period.

This is the second Charter challenge launched by Dying with Dignity. On June 17, 2024 Dying with Dignity launched a Charter challenge to force all medical institutions to provide euthanasia.

The Dying with Dignity lawsuit proves how extreme that the euthanasia lobby in Canada has become.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition will seek to intervene in this court case.

Important articles on this topic: 

• Euthanasia Prevention Coalition says that the expansion of euthanasia to include mental illness should be scrapped (Link).
• Treat people with mental health problems, don't kill them (Link).
• Provincial Health Ministers urge the Federal government to indefinitely pause euthanasia for mental illness alone (Link).
• Euthanasia for those with mental illness should not be on the table (Link).
• Euthanasia for mental illness should never come to pass (Link). 
• Canada's euthanasia law. We've already gone too far. (Link). 
• Canada has revealed the horror of assisted dying (Link). 
• Canada must put the brakes on euthanasia for mental illness (Link).
• Don't abandon people to death by euthanasia (MAiD) (Link)
• 
  

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.