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?”

MAiD raised with Vancouver priest during hospital care — twice

My latest reporting in the B.C. Catholic newspaper

A Vancouver priest recovering from a hip fracture at Vancouver General Hospital says he was twice offered assisted death by health-care staff who knew he was a priest and opposed to euthanasia — a practice critics say is growing as medical professionals are increasingly encouraged to initiate such conversations.

“There are some things you just don’t talk about to some people,” said Father Larry Holland, who has completed studies in health-care chaplaincy in addition to serving at numerous parishes in the Archdiocese of Vancouver.

He described his reaction when a doctor brought up the option of MAiD should his condition deteriorate. “I think I was very shocked,” he said. “It is such a sensitive subject.”

Father Holland, 79, is currently convalescing at VGH after suffering a hip fracture from a fall in his bathroom on Christmas Day. He spoke to The B.C. Catholic about the offers of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) from two health-care professionals, despite their knowing he was a Catholic priest.

Father Holland said he wasn’t dying then or now and that the doctor’s mention of MAiD left him “kind of silent” for a moment. The doctor then raised the subject again, saying it’s “something they have to discuss with someone who’s been given a terminal diagnosis.”

Father Holland recalled telling the doctor he was morally opposed to euthanasia. The doctor explained that “he just wanted to make sure that, if a [terminal] diagnosis came up or not ... I knew of the different services I had access to.”

Weeks later, a second offer of MAiD came from a nurse who the priest said seemed uncomfortable raising the topic and was likely doing so out of compassion because of the pain he was enduring.

“It’s a false compassion, really,” he said.

A spokesman for Vancouver Coastal Health, which operates VGH, told The B.C. Catholic in an email that “staff may consider bringing up MAiD based on their clinical judgment, provided they possess the necessary knowledge and skills to do so.”

Staff are also “responsible for answering questions when patients bring up the topic of MAiD,” the spokesman said.

The two incidents arise as Canada approaches 100,000 assisted dying deaths, a milestone explored in a B.C. Catholic series starting this week. Over the next several weeks, the paper will look at how a decade of legalized killing has reshaped health care, ethics, and attitudes toward life and death in Canada.

Father Larry Lynn, the Archdiocese’s pro-life chaplain, said he was shocked to hear about Father Holland’s case.

“This must surely be among the most appalling examples of Canada’s coercive and insensitive euthanasia regime,” Father Lynn said in an interview.

He said it’s disturbing that a health-care provider suggests euthanasia with any patient, and particularly when the patient is a consecrated religious known to be morally opposed. “It places the medical practitioner into the role of the devil, tempting a vulnerable person into mortal sin.”

He’s equally troubled that Canadian euthanasia providers aren’t ruling out initiating discussions with Roman Catholics about MAiD. In a document titled Bringing up Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) as a clinical care option, the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers recommends against assuming patients oppose MAiD because of their faith.

The document says, “Health care professionals may draw incorrect assumptions about a person’s views on MAiD; e.g., they may assume that a patient objects to MAiD because she is a Roman Catholic nun, and yet Roman Catholic nuns and others dedicated to a faith-based way of life have requested MAiD.” The booklet does not provide a source for the information.

An updated version published in March removes the Catholic reference but gives the same advice regarding people of a “faith community” and even those of “strong faith.”

Father Lynn called it “diabolical” to use a nun as an example for overcoming a patient’s moral objections.

The booklet reflects a recent trend of encouraging health-care personnel to initiate MAiD discussions with patients. In November, The B.C. Catholic reported on a little-known 2023 Health Canada document urging health authorities and professional bodies to adopt “practice standards” requiring doctors and nurse practitioners to raise MAiD with certain patients.

The MAiD assessors and providers document similarly says physicians and nurse practitioners involved in care planning and consent processes “have a professional obligation to initiate a discussion about MAiD if a patient might be eligible for MAiD.” However, Health Canada does not have the authority to require provinces or health authorities to adopt such guidelines and The B.C. Catholic found no evidence of any public agency or professional body in B.C. doing so.

Amanda Achtman, creator of the anti-euthanasia project Dying to Meet You and ethics director of Canadian Physicians for Life, says initiating MAiD discussions in a medical setting is a form of coercion that attacks patients’ deepest convictions when they’re vulnerable. To “torment” someone who has deeply held beliefs with an offer of MAiD is “an attack on their identity,” Achtman said.

Father Holland admitted he was in so much pain that he could “feel the temptation” to accept MAiD. “It’s a human reaction. We always look for the easy way out.”

Conservative MP Garnett Genuis has introduced Bill C-260, An Act to Prevent Coercion of Persons Not Seeking Medical Assistance in Dying, which would prohibit federal employees from proactively offering or recommending MAiD. The bill resulted from incidents of bureaucrats such as veterans counsellors trying to steer vulnerable people toward assisted dying.

The Alberta government introduced legislation in March that would restrict regulated health professionals from providing information about MAiD to their patients unless the patient brings it up. The Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act would also restrict the public display of MAiD information, such as posters, within health-care facilities.

The bill is worth supporting, said Achtman, who lives in Calgary. “Simply being offered euthanasia already kills the person, because it defeats and deflates their sense of self-worth and value.”

The unwanted initiation of MAiD discussions in Canada made international headlines in March after Achtman shared the story of an 84-year-old woman, Miriam Lancaster, who went to VGH last year for severe back pain. She said the first doctor she spoke with in the emergency room raised MAiD before any diagnostic work had been done. Lancaster’s daughter was present and confirmed the incident, adding her mother eventually responded to rehabilitation and rest.

The Catholic chaplain at VGH, Father Ronald Sequeira, said it’s a constant struggle to help suffering patients not lose hope. He tries to offer them “some kind of encouragement and comfort,” but many give up.

“The moment you lose hope, the devil comes in, in different personalities, and says, ‘Do you want MAiD? I don’t want people to suffer.’”

Patients often don’t realize that suffering is redemptive, he said. “

God makes us more pure, more strong, through the suffering when we offer it up,” Father Sequeira said. “So we give hope — help them not to lose hope.”

Father Holland said turning down an offer of death opens one to new experiences. Even enduring pain “can encourage growth,” he said. “It can motivate you, it can open up new worlds, new vistas, new opportunities,” including enriched relationships.

He said he is sharing his story in the hope it will help others. “I went through it; you can go through it too.”

MAiD at 10: how assisted dying is reshaping Canada

My latest in the B.C. Catholic newspaper.

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.

In a corner stood a nurse practitioner beside a 77-year-old woman, Alice, resting in her favourite reclining chair.

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.

Germain McKenzie, a theologian and sociologist with Catholic Pacific College in Langley, said it is important to look at the moral and societal trends that converged to produce the current MAiD regime.

“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