The origin of this special series goes back to last November, when new national data showed Canada now records more euthanasia deaths than any other country, and the second-highest rate internationally. Those figures prompted a question that has only grown more urgent: What has 10 years of medical assistance in dying meant for Canada?
Reporter Terry O’Neill set out to look beyond individual developments and examine their cumulative effect on the law, on health care, and on attitudes toward life and death.
Several of these questions are now being tested in real time — in the courts, in Parliament, and within the health system itself. Together, they point to a country struggling to understand how MAiD is shaping health care, public policy, and the lives of individual Canadians.
The living room of the modest Surrey bungalow felt unusually still, its drawn curtains softening the sunlight and protecting the privacy of those inside.
Alice was in the process of being euthanized by the nurse, who had just finished injecting the last of three drugs in the deadly cocktail most commonly used to administer medically assisted dying in Canada. Two doctors had certified that she was suffering from a fatal disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and that she was legally competent.
Alice’s death was typical of many of the nearly 17,000 MAiD deaths recorded in Canada in 2024 — with one notable exception. She had asked to be surrounded by her four grandchildren, ages six to 13, while she was being killed. The family complied.
As related to the B.C. Catholic by an acquaintance who has direct knowledge of the events of Alice’s MAiD death, the grandchildren were traumatized by the experience. The B.C. Catholic agreed to keep the source unnamed and to change details of Alice’s death (including her name) to protect the family’s identity.
“Those poor kids, they cried and cried,” the source said. “It was simply horrible. They didn’t understand why they had to be there.”
He said he believed Alice had not fully considered the impact on her family when making her decision. As well, he could not understand the children’s parents’ decision to agree to Alice’s request.
“That death—it’s going to haunt them forever,” he said. “How can those kids not be scarred by that? What are the long-term consequences going to be?”
It’s an essential question that has implications beyond an individual incident. MAiD, one of the most permissive euthanasia regimes in the world, has had a significant impact on Canada in ways that haven’t been fully considered. In this series, the effects of medically provided death will be examined: what it has done to the nation’s psyche, the social and psychological consequences that we see today, and what might be the consequences in years to come.
Critics say none of these questions were adequately considered 10 years ago when, responding to emotional appeals to shorten end-of-life suffering and invoking personal autonomy, Parliament legalized euthanasia in June 2016.
Proponents of MAiD said at the time that it would be available only for those near death and suffering grievously. But what critics feared, an inevitable slippery slope of ever-more-permissive euthanasia, led to a rapid expansion, especially after the law was amended in 2021 to allow euthanasia for people whose death was not reasonably foreseeable.
The U.S. magazine The Atlantic captured this country’s MAiD crisis in a September 2025 feature story entitled, “Canada is killing itself.” The story described how patients who aren’t dying can now access MAiD, and reported on the looming March 2027 legalization of MAiD for those whose sole affliction is a mental-health disorder.
The Atlantic captured this country’s MAiD crisis in a September 2025 feature story entitled, “Canada is killing itself.” (The Atlantic) Writer Elaina Plott Calabro noted that the Quebec College of Physicians has raised the possibility of legalizing euthanasia for infants born with severe malformations, a practice “currently legal only in the Netherlands, the first country to adopt it since Nazi Germany did so in 1939.”
Statistics Canada figures already paint a grim picture. By the end of 2024, Canada had recorded 76,800 MAiD deaths, including 16,499 in 2024 alone—the highest single-year number of any country in the world. Canada has the second-highest MAiD rate as a percentage of all deaths, at 5.1 per cent, trailing only the Netherlands’ 5.8 per cent.
The report noted that Canada’s caucasian population accounted for a staggering 96 per cent of all MAiD deaths, even though it constitutes only 70 per cent of the population. The federal government has not looked for an explanation, but it has studied the question of why the Indigenous MAiD rate is so low.
According to Statistics Canada, about 1,400 people died by MAiD every month in Canada in 2024. If that rate continues through 2026, the country will record its 100,000th MAiD death before June 17, the tenth anniversary of the date the Criminal Code amendments permitting euthanasia received Royal Assent.
Catholic observers interviewed for this series agree that MAiD’s legalization has unleashed a cultural shift that has altered the country’s moral imagination.
Effects include: cultural shift toward viewing death as a solution; erosion of the social commitment to care for the sick, elderly, and disabled; undermining of palliative care; marginalization of disabled and vulnerable people; and distortion of the role and identity of medicine. Canada’s permissive MAiD regime has blurred the boundary between legal euthanasia and illegal “mercy killing,” says Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.
Schadenberg pointed to the February sentencing in Ontario Superior Court of Philippe Hebert, who was sentenced to two years less a day of house arrest following his guilty plea to manslaughter after he used an incontinence pad to suffocate his seriously ill partner of more than 40 years, Richard Rutherford. The Crown had asked for Hebert to serve six years in jail, while the defence had asked for a two-year term.
In passing sentence, Superior Court Justice Kevin Phillips Ssaid, “In every respect, this was an assisted-suicide mercy killing.” A more accurate description would have inserted the word “illegal” before “assisted-suicide.”
Under Canadian law, it is illegal to aid or abet a person in ending their life except under the specific conditions set out for MAiD, which allows for either clinician-administered or self-administered death. Hebert’s actions fall outside that legal framework.
Schadenberg now fears it will be “open season” for assisted suicides conducted by persons who are not medical practitioners. In a blog post, he wrote that Canada’s legalization of euthanasia “has eroded the willingness of judges to penalize someone who has murdered a sick friend or relative.”
The impacts of Canada’s growing pro-MAiD culture are also being felt within the Catholic Church, even though it holds that suicide, assisted suicide (when fatal drugs prescribed by a doctor but are then self-administered), and euthanasia (a doctor or nurse practitioner administers the drugs) are gravely wrong.
Pressure from pro-MAiD activists on Catholic health facilities, such as those operated in Vancouver by Providence Health Care, has received significant media attention and led to the provincial government’s imposition of a MAiD clinic abutting St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. That clinic, which is called Shoreline Space, opened in January 2025.
The issue has also been the subject of a B.C. Supreme Court case challenging how MAiD access is handled at St. Paul’s Hospital and other Providence facilities.
Writing in the October 2025 edition of Pulse, published by the U.S.-based Catholic Medical Association, medical ethicist Yuriko Ryan of Vancouver said the presence of Shoreline at St. Paul’s is a form of contamination and coercion of Catholic health care.
“If Catholic healthcare is to remain a witness to the dignity of life, then MAiD-free zones cannot be left to chance, convenience, or the whim of those who promote euthanasia,” Ryan wrote.
Canada’s permissive MAiD regime has blurred the boundary between legal euthanasia and illegal “mercy killing,” says one critic. (Adobe) She called on CMA members and all who serve in health care to witness to the dignity of life by safeguarding spaces that are theologically rooted and morally grounded. “Let us call our brothers and sisters, regardless of vocation, to build to care, not to coerce,” Ryan wrote.
Catholic leaders are also concerned that a pro-MAiD mentality seems to be infecting some Catholic laity. The B.C. Catholic has been told by priests and laypeople of instances of Catholics choosing to be euthanized. A Fraser Valley woman said she knows of four fellow parishioners who succumbed to the lure of MAiD. “I can’t understand it,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified. “They were all practising Catholics and then, at the last minute, they threw it all away.”
Hope and Dignity, a guide produced by the Archdiocese of Edmonton and supported by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, offers advice on what to do if a Catholic family member is planning MAiD, how priests should respond pastorally, and whether sacraments can be offered in such circumstances.
The guide offers a prayer “for those tempted by assisted suicide or despair,” indicating the issue is no longer theoretical.
Eoin Connolly, executive director of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute, points a finger of blame at judges and politicians for Canada’s descent into MAiD permissiveness.
“By focussing narrowly on the circumstances of particular individuals, the courts and legislators failed sufficiently to account for the broader social and cultural implications that such legalization would have for Canadian society as a whole,” Connolly said in an interview.
“It’s the idea of autonomy pushed to the extreme,” McKenzie said. “But it’s not the right way to live. You cannot live like that as a harmonious society.”
McKenzie identified five trends that helped create the conditions that allowed the right to personal autonomy to take precedence over all others and elevate euthanasia to a perceived right in Canada:
· Radicalization of the Enlightenment principle that reason alone should guide one’s life
· Expansion of the Romantic concept of devoting oneself to self-discovery and self-fulfilment
· Growth of mass society and mass media, giving power to “the few” to shape the thoughts and actions of “the many”
· Capitalism’s tendency to devolve moral considerations into utilitarian cost-benefit analyses
· Developments in medical technology, allowing unnatural and immoral practices
Western society was once knitted together by a Christian ethos that has unravelled since the Second World War, McKenzie said. “Basically because of what is called secularization.”
Over the next several issues, The B.C. Catholic will examine how MAiD has affected the country, what the long-term consequences might be, why the Catholic Church’s opposition to MAiD is so firm, and where there is hope for stemming or reversing the expansion of MAiD.
Key dates in MAiD in Canada
February 6, 2015
Supreme Court of Canada’s Carter v. Canada ruling orders legalization of assisted dying.
June 17, 2016
First federal MAiD law (Bill C-14) receives Royal Assent.
September 11, 2019
Quebec Superior Court’s Truchon and Gladu decision strikes down Bill C-14’s restriction limiting MAiD to those whose natural death was reasonably foreseeable.
March 17, 2021
Expansion of MAiD (Bill C-7), removing the “reasonably foreseeable death” requirement and creating two eligibility tracks.
February 15, 2023
Parliament’s Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying recommends allowing MAiD for “mature minors” and permitting advance requests.
March 17, 2027
Planned expansion of MAiD to persons whose sole underlying medical condition is mental illness.
MAiD in Canada: what the law allows
What is MAiD?
Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) allows a doctor or nurse practitioner to end a patient’s life, or to prescribe medication for that purpose, under conditions set out in Canadian law.
Two tracks
Track 1: Patients whose natural death is reasonably foreseeable.
Track 2: Patients whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable.
What changed in 2021
Bill C-7 removed the requirement that a person’s death be reasonably foreseeable, expanding eligibility and creating the two-track system.
What is scheduled for 2027
MAiD is set to expand to include individuals whose sole underlying condition is mental illness.
What is being debated now
A private member’s bill introduced by MP Tamara Jansen seeks to prohibit MAiD where mental illness is the sole underlying condition.
MAiD in Canada: by the numbers
Total deaths
76,800 MAiD deaths in Canada by the end of 2024
Annual deaths
16,499 MAiD deaths in 2024
Share of all deaths
5.1% of all deaths in Canada
Monthly rate
About 1,400 MAiD deaths per month
Projection
Canada is expected to reach approximately 100,000 MAiD deaths in 2026
Global comparison
Canada has one of the highest MAiD rates in the world, second only to the Netherlands
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