Dystopian vision of euthanasia becomes real

Turner Classic Movies presented the dystopian 1973 movie Soylent Green a few days ago, and I was struck by how much the fictional "thanatorium (top photo)," where the character played by Edward G. Robinson presents himself to be euthanized, resembles the real-life, modern-day "Horizon Space" (bottom photo) standalone MAiD euthanasia room operated by the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. I wrote about Horizon Space last year. And then just a week later, I wrote this follow-up story.

Responding to Canada's MAiD crisis

Following are links to resource and some ideas about how opponents of legalized euthanasia in Canada can respond to the country's MAiD crisis.

GET INVOLVED

Support Conservative MP Tamara Jansen’s private member’s bill, C-218, to prevent euthanasia for mental illness, by excluding mental illness from being considered a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” for the purposes of MAiD. (Passage of this bill may no longer be necessary because a parliamentary committee has now recommended the same thing.) Learn more

Support MP Garnett Genuis’s private member’s bill, C-260, to that would ban a government bureaucrat in a position of authority from proposing MAID to a person who is not asking for it, on the grounds that initiating such a discussion is coercive. Learn more

Oppose Health Canada’s “Model Standard Practice for MAiD,” which recommends that, when certain conditions are met, doctors must initiate a discussion about MAiD. Learn more

Support a call for a full review of Canada’s permissive MAiD law. Learn more

Let your member of Parliament know that you oppose allowing advance requests for MAiD. Learn more

Inform elected officials about your opposition to extending MAiD to so-called mature minors. Learn more

Oppose Quebec physicians’ call for legal infanticide. Learn more

Support better programs and funding for the disabled, for whom MAiD is often easier to access than proper support: Learn more

Call for better palliative care in hospitals and hospices, which critics say is being undermined by MAiD. Learn more

Ask your MLA to lift the veil of secrecy over the provincial government MAiD oversight unit. Learn more

Support or help form a community or parish group that works to combat the sick and elderly’s loneliness, which may be a prime reason for wanting MAiD. Learn more

ACCESS RESOURCES

Healing Resources from the Archdiocese of Vancouver: How our Faith reduces or eliminates the fear of death.

The Archdiocese of Edmonton’s “Hope & Dignity: A Catholic Response to Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide” resource.

Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishop’s resources on suffering and end of life, including the Horizons of Hope toolkit on palliative care.

Canadian Physicians for Life

Christian Medical and Dental Association of Canada

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Delta Hospice Association

Life Canada

The de Veber Institute for Bioethics and Social Research’s “Echoes: Palliative Care Stories of Canada”

WHAT IS YOUR ELEVATOR PITCH?

Increasingly these days, Catholics are being called to defend their opposition to legalized euthanasia. Because religious responses usually get little traction, the B.C. Catholic asked a variety of commentators to formulate a secular “elevator pitch” that could be used by other Catholics in response to the usual “personal-autonomy” and “solution-to-suffering” reasons cited in support of Medical Assistance in Dying. Here are those responses:

"Death is not the solution to suffering. Quite simply, everybody deserves suicide prevention rather than suicide assistance. There’s nothing that should ever happen to any one of us that would lead to us being met with a look that says, 'Maybe you’re better off dead.' There is always more that we can do in terms of love. And euthanasia and assisted suicide represent a failure to love." – Amanda Achtman, Director of Ethics, Canadian Physicians for Life

"End of life care—including intolerable suffering—is actually well-managed by hospice or palliative care. Furthermore, MAiD offers a short cut which totally ignores the spiritual dimension of life." --Denis Boyd, Coquitlam psychologist

"So, what you’re actually saying is that the person’s life no longer has any meaning." -– Mary O’Neill, president, Talitha Koum Society

"Euthanasia is not actually about autonomy because it involves a doctor or nurse practitioner killing someone by lethal poison. Autonomy is an act that one does by oneself. This is an issue of giving doctors and nurse practitioners the right in law to kill you." --Alex Schadenberg, executive director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

"Do you know how MAiD actually kills you? The MAiD cocktail of drugs is this—a pinch of Medazolam to make you sleepy. Then, a powerful injection of Propofol that scorches the lungs and causes them to fill with fluid. Finally, the paralytic Rocuronium, so it all looks so 'beautiful and peaceful.' It would be more accurate to call it Medical Assistance in Drowning. It’s the new standard of so-called compassion, dignity and human rights in Canada." --Angelina Ireland, president, Delta Hospice Society

"Our lives are meant to be an example to family members and friends of how to live a good life. Many family histories are about just that—remembering our ancestors in what they did that was good or even extraordinary. The way in which we face our death can also be a testimony of how a person can virtuously face the end of her life and what is it that she wants to teach the following generations about living that moment. This excludes euthanasia. Of course, this can only be understood if we appreciate the fact that we are bound to others and have duties towards them." –Germain McKenzie, professor, Redeemer Catholic College

"Your life is precious. If you are in pain or suffering or afraid, I want a world in which someone holds out a hand to you in comfort and support; not one where someone says, 'Your life is not worth living, so why don't you just end it.'" --Sister Rhonda Brown, Daughters of Saint Mary of Providence

"Giving the right to people to have themselves killed, because they want to avoid a loss of dignity or some pain, is wrong for several reasons. It diminishes our trust in doctors and nurses if we know that they have the power to kill us. It’s a selfish act that can upset family members—even traumatize them. And, perhaps most important of all, it erodes the respect for life that our society was built on." --John Hof, St. Joseph’s Parish (Langley), veteran pro-life activist

B.C. gov't silent as 'shocking' MAiD errors pile up

A version of this story will appear soon at the Canadian Catholic News website.

A confidential British Columbia government document obtained by Canadian Catholic News shows that doctors, nurse practitioners, and pharmacists in that province committed what observers say is a “shocking” and “alarming” number of procedural errors while managing euthanasia cases.

The Ministry of Health report, entitled “Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) Oversight 2024 Year End Report,” was made public in response to a Freedom of Information application.

It shows that more than half of all “MAiD case outcomes”—51.9 percent, to be exact—during that year required some sort of corrective “follow-up” by the province’s secretive MAiD Oversight Unit.

The province recorded 4,169 MAiD cases in 2024, including 1,169 cases in which euthanasia applications were launched but the fatal procedure was not conducted.

The oversight unit found 2,807 errors in all such MAiD files, 353 of which “required education to practitioners and pharmacists to ensure they understand legal requirements and the professional standards associated with MAiD,” the confidential report states.

“It’s all very shocking that you have such a large amount and percentage of errors in British Columbia,” Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Ontario-based Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, said in an interview. “It’s clear there are huge problems.”

The situation is particularly acute because B.C. leads the country in the percentage of all deaths that are caused by MAiD, Schadenberg pointed out. In 2024, for example, 6.5 percent of the province’s deaths were attributed to euthanasia, compared with the national average of 5.1 percent.

Amanda Achtman, ethics director of Canadian Physicians for Life, said the report has troubling implications as it suggests that MAiD is not really medical care, “but rather abandonment.”

“The staggering level of errors surrounding the practice of euthanasia in Canada betrays a level of indifference and callousness toward Canadian patients at end of life,” Achtman said in an interview. “At the same time, every euthanasia death is a medical ‘error’ because it is an aberration of sound medical practice rooted in the Hippocratic oath to ‘do not harm.’”

The harm caused by the errors is widespread. For families, whose loved ones have been euthanized, errors by MAiD practitioners are not merely gaps in bureaucratic paperwork, “but represent the negligence with which their loved ones were dismissively treated at the height of their greatest vulnerability,” she said.

B.C.’s Minister of Health, Josie Osborne, did not respond to a request for an interview on the subject. And nor has she yet answered questions, raised in the B.C. Legislature in April by Opposition Health Critic Dr. Anna Kindy, about the need for better and more-public oversight of B.C.’s MAiD regime.

“Will B.C. commit to public annual reporting, not just of MAiD volume but of compliance concerns, referrals ... [MAiD ]trends, and recommendations for system improvement?” Dr. Kindy asked Osborne.

Dr. Kindy’s questions were based, in part, on the B.C. Catholic newspaper’s July 2025 publication of a report on the MAiD Oversight Unit’s 2023 report, which found 2,833 errors in the management of 3,808 MAiD cases. B.C. family doctor Kevin Sclater, who quit his job at a hospice in 2022, in part, because of the “moral distress” he said he suffered by having to discuss MAiD with patients, said he is “shocked about an error rate that is so high. The Ministry of Health really should tighten up that issue.”

With the Minister not yet answering questions about the error rate, CCN turned to B.C.’s professional medical association, Doctors of B.C., for comment on the need to better manage MAiD in the province.

A spokesman answered that the evaluation of “clinical outcomes falls outside our scope,” and said answers to “questions related to regulatory oversight” were the purview of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC.

But that institution, in turn, said its mandate is only to regulate physicians and surgeons, not to “comment on clinical, health or health system matters.” It suggested contacting the Ministry of Health, instead.

Dr. Sclater agreed that the ministry should be responsible for improving the administration of MAiD. As it stands now, “a MAiD assessment is really only a superficial competency assessment,” he said. Because it “doesn’t evaluate and document a person’s competence for medical decision-making ... the entire evaluation process is really a sham.”

He added that the current process also leaves the public “very vulnerable to the whims of the euthanasia provider, who may be on a mission to ‘help’ a group of people who have a restricted capacity to object.”

The overlapping issues—of lax oversight, multiple agencies’ failure to take responsibility for enforcement of rules, and rogue euthanasia-specialist doctors—also arose in a parliamentary committee’s June 17 recommendation to “indefinitely exclude” from eligibility for MAiD a patient whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness.

Committee co-chair Dr. Marcus Powlowski (Lib – Thunder Bay-Rainy River) wrote in a “supplementary opinion” to the main report that the committee “heard disturbing stories of questionable conduct by some MAiD providers.”

In fact, Dr. Powlowski, a physician himself, wrote, “it is not hard to conclude that some providers take an exceedingly expansive interpretation” of MAiD-eligibility rules and exhibit “a seemingly cavalier attitude towards end of a life.”

Furthermore, he said the committee heard “scant, if any evidence” to indicate that bodies, such as colleges of physicians and surgeons, “provide adequate safeguards” or have “seriously pursued allegations of misconduct by MAiD providers.”

“Several witnesses suggested the criminal system, the medical colleges, and at times the government ministries responsible for MAiD provision ... all allegedly treat enforcement as someone else’s responsibility,” he wrote.

He could have been describing CCN’s failure to find a government or professional organization willing to comment about the MAiD Oversight Unit’s report.

Release of the B.C. document comes at the same time as Canada marked the 10th anniversary of the legalization of MAiD on June 17—an anniversary that prompted the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Standing Committee for Family and Life to issue a statement urging Catholics to “remain steadfast in opposing euthanasia and assisted suicide, to pray for the conversion of hearts and minds away from this practice, and to be present to persons who are sick and vulnerable.”

While elimination of legalized euthanasia is also the ultimate goal of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, Schadenberg said tighter control, better oversight, and public reporting on MAiD remains an urgent need in British Columbia and elsewhere.

Indeed, B.C.’s own confidential data paint a picture of a MAiD system operating with significant procedural failings and no clear lines of accountability.

With the Ministry of Health not responding to an interview request, professional bodies deflecting responsibility, and at least one federal lawmaker warning of “cavalier” practices among some providers, British Columbians are left with a regime in which thousands of life‑and‑death decisions proceed with limited transparency and inconsistent oversight.

As MAiD continues to expand and the province continues to record the highest euthanasia rate in Canada—and Canada itself continues to record the second highest such rate in the world—the unanswered questions about safety, competence, and public protection appear more urgent than ever.