Calls grow for independent MAiD oversight in B.C.

And yet again, more of my work on MAiD in the B.C. Catholic.

In this fourth part of our MAiD at 10 series examining the scale and impact of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada, reporter Terry O’Neill looks at growing concerns with oversight and accountability as MAiD deaths continue to rise. Critics say British Columbia’s largely opaque review system leaves vulnerable patients at risk and provides little public transparency about how safeguards are being enforced.

B.C.’s euthanasia oversight system operates largely in secret, with no public reports and little accountability, says the opposition health critic, who is calling for public accountability so vulnerable people aren’t wrongly euthanized.

Dr. Anna Kindy (shown in photo, speaking in legislative committee)

, a family physician and MLA for North Island, said in an interview that B.C.’s opaque oversight system should be abolished and replaced with transparency and better guardrails in how medical assistance in dying is administered and delivered.

Speaking in the B.C. Legislature on May 4, Kindy questioned how MAiD is administered in B.C., calling for Health Minister Josie Osborne to create a public, impartial review board similar to Ontario’s MAiD Death Review Committee. The independent, multidisciplinary, expert body would be established by the office of the chief coroner.

Kindy cited figures in a 2025 B.C. Catholic report on B.C.’s MAiD Oversight Unit, calling the findings “staggering.”

In an interview she said, “There is no independent oversight, obviously. There have been people falling through the cracks … vulnerable people.”

She called for a team of independent experts to oversee MAiD, saying the province may be breaking the law.

Osborne said she would provide written responses to Kindy’s questions.

Kindy’s concerns are being echoed by Dr. Ramona Coelho, a leading Canadian MAiD critic who says the B.C. government’s euthanasia oversight is so inadequate that even doctors and nurse practitioners who “deliver” MAiD complain about its shortfalls.

“B.C.’s oversight system is a black box,” said Coelho, a family physician who practises in London, Ont. In an interview, she said the oversight system issues no public reports, nor does it provide feedback to MAiD practitioners.

The result is a secretive system that leaves MAiD providers in the dark. “They don’t know if what they are doing is wrong,” she said.

Critics say the need for rigorous oversight is especially great in B.C., where 6.5 per cent of deaths in 2024 were attributed to MAiD—the highest rate in Canada. B.C. recorded 2,997 MAiD deaths that year.

The B.C. government has never issued a public report on the findings of the MAiD Oversight Unit, which last year was overseen by the same bureaucrat who headed overall MAiD administration. B.C. has never publicly announced the existence of the unit.

Only one report, detailing MAiD assessors and providers’ 2,833 administrative and operational errors in 2023, has been made public, and only because of a Freedom of Information application by The B.C. Catholic. The newspaper is still awaiting results of an FOI application for the oversight unit’s 2024 findings.

Calls for more robust MAiD oversight in B.C. coincide with developments in two other provinces: Alberta’s announcement of a rigorous, public MAiD-review system, and reports that Ontario’s lauded MAiD Death Review Committee is being weakened.

Alberta Justice Minister Mickey Amery said on March 18 that, as part of the province’s new regulatory framework for MAiD, the province will have the power “to include additional oversight,” much like Ontario’s committee at the time.

The oversight committee will “make sure that decisions made by MAiD assessors and those who provide ... MAiD are reviewed,” Amery said.

He made the announcement during a news conference (photo at right) led by Premier Danielle Smith and attended by Coelho, who provided expert advice to the government.

Alberta’s new safeguards will also:

*Ban Track 2 MAiD procedures, in which the patient’s “natural death” is not reasonably foreseeable

*Ban MAiD where mental illness is the sole underlying medical condition

*Ban MAiD for mature minors

*Protect the rights of facilities that refuse to carry out MAiD

*Prevent medical personnel from initiating discussions about MAiD.

Meanwhile , the Globe and Mail reported this month that the Ontario government has removed MAiD critics such as Dr. Coelho and Trudo Lemmens, a health-law professor at the University of Toronto, from its review committee.

The newspaper also reported that the government is scaling back the committee’s responsibilities, shifting its focus from “independent expert review” to that of “guidance to practitioners” and “supporting emerging MAiD practice.”

In a letter to Ontario’s chief coroner, obtained by the Globe, Lemmens said the changes coincide with “demands from MAiD providers for less transparency, less scrutiny, and diminished responsibility.”

Coelho said the changes will weaken the committee by diluting feedback to MAiD providers and leaving it made up entirely of MAiD providers and supporters.

“It’s like having a panel on tobacco safety but saying that you’re not going to have people who are concerned or against tobacco, you’re just going to have tobacco lobbyists or people who are supportive of tobacco.”

“No one in Canada is doing enough” to keep MAiD providers in line, Coelho said. The Ontario committee is not reporting to police incidents of wrongdoing, nor are malpractice cases being prosecuted.

She is “hopeful” Alberta will get it right.

Kindy said she remains concerned that B.C.’s inadequate health-care system is forcing patients to choose between MAiD and long wait times.

“It’s not the first time she has sounded the alarm. In a December social-media post, she said, ‘In British Columbia, it’s not uncommon to be able to access MAiD faster than accessing timely life-saving treatments, and this government doesn’t want you to know that.’

She elaborated in a later interview with CortesCurrents.ca, saying the Vancouver Island health region has the highest MAiD rate in the world, something some people might see as a “cost-saving measure.”

“But I kid you not, it’s occurring when people are not accessing timely care,’ she said.

She told of individuals in Campbell River who had mental-health and pain issues who received MAiD after being unable to get help from a pain clinic soon enough.

Describing herself as a libertarian who thinks MAiD is a matter between doctor and patient, it’s also necessary to protect vulnerable populations, “especially in the midst of a health crisis where you cannot access health care.”

“We want to make sure that if MAiD is done, it’s done for the appropriate conditions, and right now we’ve bypassed that.”

She refused MAiD, then lived to see a miracle

In wrapping up my series of stories, in the B.C. Catholic, marking 10 years of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada, I ended with a story emphasizing the good that can happen when MAiD is refused and a natural death is embraced. And there's more. Here is that final story.

Pat Gray rested on her bed at Chilliwack General Hospital, her Bible at her side. She was 67 and dying of lung cancer. As told to the B.C. Catholic by her daughter Bronwyn Gray (shown below in photo with her mother, Pat), Pat was calm during those summer days two years ago as she prepared for what she believed could be her final journey.

Weakened by the disease that was taking her life, she could only speak in a whisper, but she could still read, and it was to her Bible that she turned in she and her family believed were her final days.

On one July morning, Pat’s doctor approached her as usual. This time, however, it wasn’t to ask how she was doing, but to offer to euthanize her by administering medical assistance in dying (MAiD).

Pat’s own account picks up the story:

“I quickly said no,” Pat said in a note she dictated to Bronwyn, “and then showed her my bookmark that said, ‘With God all things are possible.’ She agreed with me and then added that God uses tools to help us and that MAiD was a help for those in great pain.”

Pat said she felt saddened that, instead of offering hope, her doctor seemed to want her “gone.”

Bronwyn said her mother had every reason to be upset by the uninvited offer, and by what she perceived as an attempt to use her faith to justify it.

Pat used the moment to reflect more deeply on her beliefs.

“The doctor didn’t realize that God has such a BIG plan for His children, that one’s life, no matter what, is sacred and precious, that God through Jesus puts hope in our hearts daily to sustain us,” Pat wrote. “And if God wants to use my life longer for even one more miracle, it will be worth it.”

After Bronwyn finished typing the note, Pat initialled it simply: “P.G.”

Pat died naturally and peacefully, more than than three months later, on Oct. 29, and during that time she received the “one more miracle” she had hoped for.

It was not a physical healing, but a reconciliation. In the final weeks of her life, Pat was reunited with her estranged husband, who had left her and their four children more than 30 years earlier. After decades apart, and nearly 20 years after their divorce, the couple remarried.

“It’s almost prophetic, what happened,” Bronwyn said. “My father’s reconciliation with my mom definitely made a difference in my relationship with my dad—a positive one. It was healing for the whole family.”

The healing deepened when her father spoke at Pat’s funeral.

“It was beautiful how he honoured her,” Bronwyn said. “It was amazing.”

Bronwyn later chose to share her mother’s story through a film-based ministry she founded called WorthMore, which promotes the dignity of human life and offers support to those facing end-of-life decisions.

As the 10th anniversary of MAiD’s legalization approaches, stories like Pat Gray’s offer a response to what critics describe as a dominant cultural narrative that frames euthanasia as compassionate and inevitable.

A recent analysis by the Cardus think tank suggests public support for MAiD may not be as firmly grounded as often portrayed. Cardus’s Feb. 12 report said many Canadians misunderstand key aspects of the law.

More than a quarter of respondents in one poll confused MAiD with withdrawing treatment, while nearly 40 percent conflated it with palliative sedation.

Only 19.2 percent correctly understood that a person does not need to be terminally ill to qualify for MAiD, and only 20.7 percent knew that a person may refuse effective treatment and still be eligible.

“Canadians’ majority support for MAiD only as a last resort is incongruent with the law,” author Rebecca Vachon wrote.

That disconnect may help explain growing political resistance in some provinces.

On March 18, Alberta introduced the Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act, which would restrict aspects of MAiD within the province.

“I think that we’re failing in our duty to give people hope,” Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said.

The act would also pre-emptively ban MAiD for mature minors and advance requests, as recommended in February 2023 by Parliament’s Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying.

The legislation would prevent “regulated health professionals” from providing information about MAiD unless the patient raises it, effectively barring doctors from initiating the kind of potentially coercive, uninvited conversations reported in the cases of Pat Gray and, as noted in the April 27 B.C. Catholic, Catholic priest Father Larry Holland.

Some coverage of the legislation has framed it as a restriction on rights. Other voices argue it reflects growing concern about how far the system has expanded.

Patricia Murphy, program director at the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute, said media portrayals play a significant role in shaping public perception.

“People couldn’t imagine this 15 years ago,” she said. “Now they see it regularly portrayed in a positive light.”

Murphy pointed to what St. John Paul II described as the “conditioning power” of media.

“When the dignity and beauty of life—even in suffering—is shown, it shapes how people think,” she said.

She pointed to initiatives such as the Echoes palliative-care storytelling project, which highlights experiences of accompaniment rather than assisted death.

One such story tells of a dying physician who declined MAiD in order to demonstrate that “dying with dignity is dying loved.”

Catholic teaching continues to reject euthanasia while affirming the duty to care for the suffering. Resources such as the Archdiocese of Edmonton’s Hope and Dignity program emphasize that human life remains sacred and that suffering, while difficult, is not without meaning.

Indigenous leaders warned Ottawa on MAiD, but it was expanded anyway

More of my MAiD coverage, marking the 10th anniversary of its legalization, as published in the BC Catholic.

In this third part of our MAiD at 10 series examining the scale and impact of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada, reporter Terry O’Neill examines Indigenous concerns surrounding MAiD, including warnings that euthanasia conflicts with traditional beliefs and may be replacing needed health care and supports.

As the Canadian Senate considered expanding MAiD eligibility in 2021, a group of 15 prominent Indigenous leaders complained they had not been properly consulted on the matter and, moreover, that they had “grave concerns” about legalized euthanasia’s adverse impact “on our vulnerable population.”

Parliament pressed ahead with the expansion despite the Indigenous concerns. The federal government then launched a program that focused more on better data collection and “listening” to diverse viewpoints than on protecting vulnerable Indigenous people from MAiD.

For at least one prominent MAiD critic, the federal government appeared more concerned with actively increasing Indigenous peoples’ access to MAiD than with improving the delivery of health services to them. health service delivery for them.

“It’s a sort of reverse discrimination,” Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, said in an interview. “It’s horrible, because the Native community was saying, ‘We don’t want this.’”

Indigenous peoples were very clear that euthanasia does not fit with their cultural values, Schadenberg said. “And how does Health Canada respond? By focusing on ways to make it easier for Indigenous people to access MAiD.”

He said the evidence is in Health Canada’s Sixth Annual Report on MAiD, released last November with statistics from 2024. of last year, which focuses on 2024 statistics.

The report noted that Caucasians, who make up about 70 per cent of Canada’s population, accounted for 96 per cent of those receiving MAiD in 2024. Indigenous people, by contrast, represent about five percent of the population but only 0.4 percent of MAiD recipients.

“You’d think Health Canada might at least wonder why so many Caucasians were opting for MAiD, but it doesn’t, said Schadenberg. “But there’s a whole section on the Indigenous numbers, and it seems more concerned about improving data collection and addressing inadequate access to MAiD than about protecting Indigenous life.”

The section entitled “Indigenous people who received MAiD” reports that low euthanasia numbers among Indigenous persons may be due to challenges in accessing MAiD, as well as “distrust of the health care system, based on experiences of anti-Indigenous racism,” potential “discomfort and/or lack of understanding” regarding MAiD, and “potential disconnection between MAiD and Indigenous worldviews.”

Given that three of the four factors suggest Indigenous opposition to MAiD, Schadenberg wonders why more isn’t being done to protect them from euthanasia.

It’s a concern shared by Brendon Moore, national chief of Canada’s Congress of Aboriginal Peoples. As reported in August 2025 in Canada’s National Observer, Moore said MAiD’s availability, especially related to the looming March 2027 expansion of MAiD to those whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness, is especially troubling for communities that already experience high rates of suicide as a result of intergenerational trauma and systemic racism.

“We’re looking for an equitable opportunity to live first,” he said. “If we had culturally safe palliative care and mental health support, some people might choose that path instead of moving toward MAiD.”

Reporter Sonal Gupta summed up the problem by writing, “The nightmare scenario: MAiD could substitute investments in living supports and mental health care if underlying conditions aren’t addressed first.”

Moore did not respond to a request from the B.C. Catholic to comment further on the issue.

upta also reported that, according to a document obtained through an access-to-information request, the federal government invested more than $3.3 million in Indigenous-led MAiD consultations across the country. In fact, just weeks after Health Canada published its latest MAiD statistical report, it published a report on the results of those consultations.

The December 2025 report says Indigenous opinion on MAiD is generally divided into three camps: support without qualification, openness only in certain circumstances, and opposition. The report does not provide percentages for each group.

Among those opposed, some participants feared that MAiD might normalize or even encourage suicide, while others said there is an urgent need for accessible, culturally appropriate health care, mental health care, and life-promotion initiatives.

The report’s summary on Indigenous opposition points to strong moral, spiritual, and religious values as the foundation of that opposition. “They said that an end-of-life decision should not be made by humans and to control it through MAiD was to overstep human boundaries,” the report states. “Death should be left in the hands of a Creator, God or higher power.”

Some opponents also view MAiD as a continuation of colonial policies or a means to control and harm Indigenous peoples. “For them, MAiD is the same as murder, genocide or a sin and the systematic euthanasia of vulnerable people,” the report states.

“Some participants felt that an individual could be coerced into choosing MAiD, with one participant saying that Indigenous peoples may be ‘bullied into a decision.’”

MAiD at 10: how the Me Generation predicted the MAiD de-generation

My latest story in the weekly B.C. Catholic newspaper

Last week’s launch of this series examined the scale and impact of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada. This week, reporter Terry O’Neill focuses on understanding how the country arrived at this point, and what those changes are beginning to reveal.

The 1970s are infamously known as the "Me Decade," a term coined by writer Tom Wolfe, who described a cultural shift toward narcissism, self-fulfilment, and hedonism among the Baby Boomer generation.

Theologian and sociologist Germain McKenzie says a similar self-centred worldview can help explain why legalized euthanasia has proven to be so popular in Canada and threatens to continue expanding in other Western nations.

As Canada approaches the 10th anniversary of the legalization of MAiD on June 17, McKenzie, who teaches at Catholic Pacific College in Langley, said in an interview that pro-life advocates need better strategies to loosen MAiD’s grip on the country. To do that, it’s important to understand how euthanasia has taken such a strong hold.

McKenzie sees five major cultural trends over the past few centuries that have propelled this country to the precipitous place it is now. Primary are the Enlightenment’s emphasis on autonomous reasoning and Romanticism’s celebration of self-fulfillment.

Those ideologies are thriving alongside capitalism’s utilitarian ethos, adverse impact of mass media, and advances in medical technology allowing previously unimaginable procedures such as gender reassignment. Together they have eroded the Christian values on which Western civilization was built, McKenzie said.

The Enlightenment and Romantic ideals alone have “radicalized” our times, he said. Where once a Christian ethos balanced them and “put some limits in place,” all of that crumbled in the turbulent years following the Second World War amid the rapid secularization of society.

Individuals now try to shape their own moral universe, as though society has reverted to an immature stage. “It’s like being a teenager,” he said.

The result is legalized medical killing, something unthinkable a generation ago outside of dystopian movies like Soylent Green (1973) and Logan’s Run (1976).

While few think Canada will become the 23rd-century society of Logan’s Run where individuals live in pleasure and comfort, but only until age 30, it’s hard to predict just what future shocks will rock a society that has lost one of its core values—valuing the lives of the sick and the elderly. Medical deaths of willing patients have become commonplace to what St. Pope John Paul II called the culture of death.

Life “has been devalued,” said Mathew Schmalz, professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Mass. “We need as a society to rethink our attitude to life,” being sensitive to “all its complexities,” joy as well as pain. Canada recorded 16,499 euthanasia deaths in 2024, thousands more than the Netherlands, which has the world’s second-highest annual total. More than five percent of all Canadian deaths are now delivered by doctors and nurse practitioners, according to Health Canada’s Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying, released last November.

An especially troubling aspect of Canada’s high MAiD numbers is that individuals with access to resources, care, and support nonetheless seem to perceive their lives as no longer worth living, says Eoin Connolly, executive director of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute.

“This suggests a deeper cultural shift in how human dignity, suffering, and dependency are understood,” Connolly told The B.C. Catholic. The trend may reveal a culture that equates dependency with loss of worth. It’s “essential” that Canada address that issue to understand why people are lining up for MAiD and to understand “the collective moral consequences of choosing MAiD as a therapeutic solution.”

Health Canada’s latest report says 4.4 per cent of MAiD deaths in 2024 were Track 2, which allows euthanasia even when death is not reasonably foreseeable. Connolly says many doctors report patients are opting for MAiD not only for suffering from illness but also the unavailability of specialized treatments and adequate community support.

“Individuals are making end-of-life decisions within a context of unmet needs and systemic neglect,” he said. What emerges is “a picture of social injustice—one in which society has failed to adequately care for its most vulnerable members, thereby contributing to decisions in favour of assisted suicide.”

Ten years after Parliament legalized euthanasia, pro-death ideology has so permeated the Canadian health-care system that doctors and nurses routinely offer assisted death to patients in hospitals, and not just in palliative-care wards.

Conservative MP Garnett Genuis has proposed a partial solution, introducing a private-member’s bill that would ban government bureaucrats from proposing MAID to someone who isn’t asking for it.

The bill, however, would not prevent doctors and nurses from initiating MAiD discussions, something MAiD opponents say can pressure the patient to accept a premature death.

Vancouver’s Providence Health Care explicitly prohibits employees from initiating discussions on MAiD, as well as prohibiting euthanasia at any of its facilities.

Denis Boyd, a Catholic psychologist based in Coquitlam, said several of his clients say they or a loved one have been approached directly and offered euthanasia. At hospitals across the Lower Mainland, MAiD is being presented “as one of the treatment modalities,” despite patients not indicating they wanted it, Boyd told The B.C. Catholic.

Equally devasting are the painful aftershocks that hit those who opposed a loved one’s decision to access MAiD, feeling it’s “disloyal” to grieve someone who died the way they wanted, said Boyd.

When someone dies a natural death after a long period of suffering, loved ones often feel relief at the end of suffering, and guilt for having such thoughts.

In the case of a MAiD death, “to admit there is immense sadness and anger and disappointment might seem contradictory to the decision of the loved one,” Boyd said.

MAiD can also ignite family turmoil. Boyd told of a man who decided on a MAiD death, “and his family, to a person, disagreed.”

As related by the hospital chaplain, the family made their wishes known to hospital staff. When the MAiD death proceeded, “family members became quite upset and angry, which in turn traumatized the staff."

To make matters worse, accounts of unrequested offers of MAiD, once considered shocking when The B.C. Catholic first made them public five years ago, now have become unremarkable.

The situation has reached the point where Patricia Murphy, of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute in Toronto, fears that the option to have a MAiD death will become a duty.

Schmalz, who is the founding editor of the Journal of Global Catholicism, agrees that dying by MAiD could become a moral obligation. “It can be a slippery slope when as a society we affirm the right to die and expand its context and justifications.”

Murphy says MAiD poses a profound moral threat by sending a message, subtle or not, “that some lives are expendable.” That sustained message may have an increasing influence on the decision making of marginalized individuals.

Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, identifies other shifts and shocks to the country’s underlying moral foundation. “Too often, death is being presented as a solution, an escape from suffering,” Schadenberg said. “The very idea of life being so precious has been lost.”

Couple that with an erosion of the social commitment to care, especially for the sick and aged. Schadenberg said when major hospitals across the country have medical personnel who are initiating MAiD discussions, palliative care becomes marginalized.

Langley pro-life veteran John Hof said euthanasia, like abortion, has corrupted the character of medicine. “Look it up in the dictionary,” Hof said. “Nowhere will you find the definition of medicine having anything to do with killing. It’s supposed to be about care and healing.”

MAiD mentality tells disabled they’re better off dead, UBC law professor says

Euthanasia has been so “sanitized and romanticized” by mainstream media that ending the lives of people with disabilities is falsely portrayed as compassionate and caring, says UBC law professor Isabel Grant. Media portrayals of MAiD as peaceful and just “going to sleep” might sound attractive to someone who has lived with significant hardship, Grant said.

“I am concerned that the expansion of MAiD has changed the experience of living in Canada for people with disabilities,” Grant told The B.C. Catholic. “Government has made into law the ableist notion that some people with disabilities are better off dead.”

Health-care professionals with a pro-MAiD mentality are essentially asking the disabled, “Are you sure you want to stay alive despite your condition?” Such an approach, she said, “fundamentally changes” how people with disabilities interact with the medical profession and with others.

“Imagine going to a doctor’s office and disclosing that you are struggling, not able to make ends meet, not able to access necessary supports,” she said. “Your doctor raises the possibility of Track 2 MAiD [available to those whose deaths are not reasonably foreseeable].”

The doctor’s message can be perceived as, “I’ve given up hope for you,” which can easily evolve into “there is no hope for you.” In the face of unavailable health-care services, death becomes the one “so-called treatment” that is always readily on offer, even by house call. Health Canada’s most recent MAiD report said more than 40 per cent of MAiD deaths in 2024 took place in a private residence.

“People are choosing MAiD because they perceive themselves to be a burden on caregivers,” Grant said. “This quietly transforms MAiD into ‘the unselfish option’ that truly demonstrates love and concern for one's family.”

The very existence of MAiD is “coercive for people with disabilities,” she said, a conclusion also reached by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

In April 2025, committee chair Rosemary Kayess went so far as to ask whether Canada’s euthanasia regime had become a de facto eugenics program aimed at the disabled. A subsequent United Nations report repeated concerns that Canada’s expanding MAiD framework may rest on assumptions that devalue the lives of people with disabilities.

Disability advocates say Ottawa has yet to publicly respond to those findings or signal meaningful changes, even as they raise questions about poverty, inadequate supports, and unequal access to care.

Grant said she also fears that the normalization of MAiD can change an average person’s relationship to the world.

“Individuals are watching their acquaintances, their friends, and strangers who have the same condition as them, dying at the hands of the state,” she said. “What message does that send about the value of their lives—about whether suicide prevention would be there for them if they needed it?”