National MAiD watchdog needed as provincial oversight failures mount, critic says

The latest in my ongoing coverage of the MAiD calamity in Canada. This story appeared on the Canadian Catholic News site on July 29.

The failure of provincial health authorities to enforce MAiD safeguards has led a leading critic of assisted suicide to call for an independent national watchdog with broad powers to investigate euthanasia irregularities and even pause MAiD deaths in some cases.

Dr. Ramona Coelho (pictured at right), a family physician in London, Ontario, and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, is speaking out, after a July 20 National Post story based on Canadian Catholic News reporting about the thousands of errors identified in managing MAiD cases in B.C. in 2024.

Coelho is calling for a national oversight body with investigative and disciplinary authority and the power to temporarily halt a MAiD death if a family or clinician reports a concern.

“There should be an independent review before the death, rather than a paperwork review afterward,” she said.

The national watchdog must also be independent of Health Canada because the department “funds and shapes MAiD practice nationally and, given its track record, cannot credibly police it,” Coelho said.

In its story, The National Post referenced CCN reporting that exposed an internal B.C. government document authored by the province’s opaque Medical Assistance in Dying Oversight Unit. The document showed that 51.9% of B.C.’s reported MAiD case outcomes in 2024 required government follow-up, with the oversight unit recording 2,807 errors, including 353 that required practitioners or pharmacists to be educated about MAiD’s legal requirements and professional standards.

The findings showed virtually no change from 2023, when the unit recorded 2,833 errors among 3,808 MAiD cases.

Coelho has previously criticized provincial MAiD regulation, saying “no one in Canada is doing enough” to keep MAiD providers in line. She said Ontario’s MAiD Death Review Committee does not report incidents of suspected wrongdoing to police, and malpractice cases are not being prosecuted.

A 2025 B.C. Catholic examination of seven years’ worth of public disciplinary records from the College of Pharmacists of B.C., the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C., and the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives found no record of disciplinary action related to MAiD. It found that two cases had been referred to police — in 2019 and 2021 — but no resulting charges were recorded publicly.

Coelho said B.C.’s oversight unit does not investigate MAiD deaths but only reviews forms submitted by practitioners. Even so, “it found errors requiring follow-up in more than half of the cases — 353 of them serious enough to require formal education of practitioners on the criminal law governing MAiD.”

The oversight unit did not respond to CCN’s request for comment about the report, which was obtained through a freedom-of-information application. When contacted by The National Post, the B.C. Ministry of Health said serious deviations from proper practice are rare. “Only 0.2% of reported MAiD cases (since 2018) involve serious compliance concerns which may have significant impact on the integrity of the MAiD process, appropriateness of care and/or public safety,” the ministry said.

Those numbers, however, represent real people, said the B.C. Conservative Party’s health critic, Dr. Anna Kindy (pictured at right). “We are talking about 34 human beings who were possibly euthanized inappropriately.”

Kindy, a family physician and MLA for North Island, has been calling for B.C. to establish an independent, transparent and accountable oversight body. “This is all about protecting vulnerable British Columbians,” she told CCN.

Kindy asked B.C. Health Minister Josie Osborne about MAiD compliance concerns earlier this year in the B.C. Legislature. Osborne said she would provide written responses to Kindy’s questions, but Kindy said she is still waiting.

“So the next question to this minister should be, ‘How many more controversial MAiD cases picked up by media will it take before this minister acts?’” CCN reached out to the B.C. and federal health ministers for comment about MAiD oversight but received no reply.

However, a Health Canada spokesperson said provinces and territories are responsible for ensuring that MAID services comply with applicable legal and regulatory requirements. The spokesperson said provincial and territorial regulatory bodies have a mandate to protect the public with respect to medical services, “and MAID is no exception.”

Catholic media have been documenting reports of unlawful assisted deaths for years. In 2023, The B.C. Catholic reported on Donna Duncan of Maple Ridge, B.C., whose daughters accused local hospital staff of improperly approving their mother’s MAiD request in 2021.

After failing to persuade the RCMP to lay charges, Alicia and Christie Duncan mounted a petition campaign to change the law in memory of their mother. The sisters continue to campaign and speak publicly about the MAiD system, and Alicia Duncan recently published a book about their concerns entitled, “The Other Side of the Straitjacket: A Daughter’s Story of Mental Illness and Assisted Dying.”

In Ontario last week, another family accused medical personnel of improperly euthanizing a loved one. In a Facebook post, the family said it wants the story of 83-year-old Brigitte Stegemann to serve “as a warning and an urgent call for greater clinical transparency, mandatory family inclusion for cognitively vulnerable patients, and strict legal accountability for facilities that operate outside the law.”

Granddaughter Brigitte Kranendonk (pictured with her grandmother) told CCN her grandmother was given a MAiD death July 10, even though she was unable to answer competency questions.

Kranendonk, who had power of attorney over her grandmother’s affairs, said Stegemann had originally said she did not want MAiD, but that a medical team at an unnamed hospital persuaded her to request it while Kranendonk was on vacation.

Catholic media also have reported on patients having the topic of MAiD raised with them against their wishes. In April, The B.C. Catholic reported on a priest who was asked several times about MAiD while convalescing from hip surgery.

Last November, The B.C. Catholic reported that a Health Canada document urged health authorities and professional bodies to adopt “practice standards” that would compel doctors and nurse practitioners to raise the topic of MAiD with patients in some circumstances.

MAiD was made legal in 2016 for persons whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable.” Amendments in 2021 created a second legally permitted route to MAiD, known as Track 2, by extending eligibility to persons experiencing a “grievous and irremediable medical condition.”

The Alberta government moved on its own in March to better regulate MAiD when it passed the Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act. The new law bans Track 2 MAiD and forbids doctors and nurses from initiating discussions of MAiD with patients.

The federal government planned to expand MAiD to people whose sole underlying condition is an irremediable mental health condition, but the expansion may not go ahead as scheduled in March 2027 after a parliamentary committee recommended against it.

Health Canada reported that 16,499 people were legally euthanized in Canada in 2024 — the highest number of any country and the second-highest rate as a proportion of all deaths, after the Netherlands.

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

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 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

Diversity, and then what?

When it comes to the sort of ethnic, cultural and racial diversity of which our country and our community are so proud, can there be “too much of a good thing”? The answer is “yes,” according to Martin Collacott, Canada’s former ambassador to Syria and Lebanon, whose opinion was featured as the “Letter of the Day” in the November 30 issue of the Vancouver Sun.

Is Collacott correct? It’s a timely question, not only for Canadians to consider, but also for Coquitlam residents to ponder as we continue to welcome new immigrants into our community on a regular basis and, more notably, also await the arrival of Syrian refugees in the coming months.

Results from "I love Canada because..." mural.

Collacott acknowledges that the increased diversity this country has experienced in recent decades “has made Canadian society more vibrant and interesting in some respects.” However, he continues, “too much diversity can create major problems.” This “has been amply illustrated in the case of more than a few European countries that have begun to discover there are limits to how much diversity they can absorb without harming themselves.”

Canada’s diverse composition may, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently said, be “our strength,” but Collacott answers that diversity is not an unqualified good, in and of itself.

Looking at the question from a common-sense point of view, Collacott makes a good point. Consider the question this way: We may say that “variety is the spice of life,” but there are limits to the sort of variety sane persons will subject themselves to.

Whether it’s in our choice of what we wear (comfortable and warm in winter, not irritating and cold) or what we eat (nutritious and delicious, not poisonous and disgusting), we have boundaries.

Similarly, while we may say that we embrace diversity, most of us would not want to live in a truly diverse community filled with, for example, unrepentant members of Pol Pot’s murderous Cambodian regime from the second half 1970s. Or, of course, with unrepentant members of ISIS. (And, for the most comprehensive look at what ISIS is all about, please click here to see a story from The Atlantic magazine.)

When diversity works in Canada it is not because of the simple fact that the country accepts diversity, and neither is it because of the celebration of diversity; rather, it is because of the fact the new Canadians reciprocate with a commitment to fit into Canada. It’s called integration, and it’s a vital and too-often unacknowledged part of the Canadian success story.

Coquitlam Canada Day activities.

Coquitlam’s official position on diversity is one of unalloyed acceptance, inclusion and celebration. You can read the policy by clicking here. It’s great as far as it goes. But even the city’s own Multicultural Advisory Committee, of which I am vice-chair, is acting of late as if there is more to multiculturalism than celebration of diversity.

Consider, for example, the committee’s successful 2015 Canada Day display which was the subject of a report to council-in-committee on November 23. The display went beyond the usual “tell us where you are from” interactive display and, instead, asked participants to write a message on an “I Love Canada Because…” mural.

For the record, six top themes emerged – natural environment, people, values and culture, safety, family, and general satisfaction with the country. City staff also presented a word cloud, shown at the top of this blog, to illustrate the predominant themes. You can read the full staff report by clicking here.

The real import of the mural is not so much in the answers it found, but in the question it asked: Why do you love Canada? The question springs from an implicit understanding that diversity is a two-way street, that “We’ll accept you, but you have to buy into what Canada is all about, too.”

This represents a real and important maturation in the development of multiculturalism in our country. It’s not just about celebration of diversity. And it’s not even abut embracing the more advanced concept of “inter-culturalism,” which encourages cross-cultural understanding.

Rather, it is about identifying and celebrating those values that we hold in common—the values that are not signs of our diversity but of our unity. And that’s a good thing.

Big country, friendly people

Swiss vacationer Lustenberger. (Photo by Terry O'Neill)

My old reporter's instincts kicked in this morning while I was at the RBC branch at Barnet and Johnson near Coquitlam Centre.

I noticed this fellow (see photo) in the parking lot. It looked like he was at the end of a long bike ride, and so I asked him about his journey.

Sure enough, he was in the final day of a five-week, two-day ride from Montreal to Vancouver. The man's name is Rene Lustenberger, and he's a retired office worker from Switzerland. And the mammoth ride was his vacation!

He spent most nights in campgrounds but had to resort to motels three times because of inclement whether (as in torrential rain).

Rene's "best" day was 222 kilometres, which he achieved while riding through Saskatchewan.

His impressions of Canada? "Big country" and "friendly people." I couldn't have said it better.

Congratulations, Rene, and have a safe journey home!