Death on Demand in Canada

The prospect of the new year is always a mix of hope and caution; but as 2023 peers over the horizon, it throws dark and ever deepening shadows over the landscape of human rights in Canada. This coming March, Canada will expand its already shockingly broad MAiD, or Medical Assistance in Dying, law, to make death-on-demand available to Canadians—including so-called ‘mature minors’—suffering from mental illness. 

The Canadian experiment with death-on-demand began in 2016. Rupa Subramanya, in a chilling post at Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, recounts how physicians warned from the beginning that the experiment was a reckless one. Dr. Ellen Warner, a professor at the University of Toronto’s medical school, objected to MAiD because “there was no way we would be able to avoid this slippery slope.” 

Now, only a few years later, MAiD has proved to be just as bad as its early detractors warned. What started as an allegedly rare and kindly way to ease the suffering of the terminally ill (the program originally included a “reasonably foreseeable” requirement putting death in six months as very likely) has ballooned into a government program offering death as an escape from loneliness, depression, or even poverty and homelessness, with just a few FaceTime or WhatsApp chats required to verify ‘eligibility.’ Applicants for death-on-demand no longer face a ten-day waiting period; doctors are no longer obligated to offer and explain the advantages of palliative care; and there are no safeguards or independent reviews to ensure that applicants for death were not coerced into their decision.

In 2021, 10,064 individuals died through MAiD—a staggering increase from the 2,838 in 2017. A total of 31,664 Canadians have died through MAiD; of those, 17% said that “isolation or loneliness” were a main reason they wanted to die. Some of those individuals specifically chose death out of fear of further COVID lockdowns; in 2020, Nancy Russell died through MAiD because she felt she could not bear another round of COVID-related isolation. 

As we read the stories of individuals who choose to die rather than to live, a heinous pattern emerges. Over and over, the Canadian government and healthcare system seems to strategically nudge vulnerable people into situations that make it easier—even unavoidable—to choose death. Nancy Russell chose death because she could not bear to be alone; the Canadian government permitted her family to attend her death while simultaneously prohibiting them from visiting her and giving her the strength to keep living.

Mitchell Tremblay, a 40-year-old in Toronto, told The Free Press that he planned to apply for MAiD as soon as the March 2023 changes make him eligible, because he cannot find stable housing. 65-year-old Les Landry said he is applying because he can no longer afford to pay rent and treat his epilepsy and PTSD. Victoria Cowie, a 21-year-old engineering student and fellow epileptic, and her mother Joan said they plan to apply for MAiD because they cannot afford food. 

A 2020 Canadian government report claimed that expanding MAiD in 2021 would save the government over $66 million in healthcare spending. And if that doesn’t make the government’s motivations clear, there are reports of hospital staff recommending death to patients who have not asked about it and telling patients how much money it will cost to care for them each day that they remain in the hospital and do not die. The Associated Press (AP) quotes from a recording in which a hospital director of ethics tells a patient that every day he spends in the hospital will cost “north of $1,500 a day,” and says that “[his] piece of [this show] was to talk to [the patient to see] if [he] had an interested in assisted dying,” even though the patient had never asked about death-on-demand. The AP also mentions a situation where an emergency-room doctor told a woman that it would be “selfish” for her disabled daughter not to choose death. In another situation, a Paralympian and military veteran requested a wheelchair ramp at her home through Veterans Affairs Canada, and instead, her caseworker offered to provide her to assisted-suicide equipment. 

What began as an alleged effort to ease the suffering of those only days from death has become a widespread social service: cheaper than hospital treatments, more permanent than housing solutions, tidier than long-term care for disabilities and illnesses. Some businesses are even trying to capitalize on the spike in assisted suicide, as when Canadian clothing retailer Simons promoted assisted suicide in their latest ad.  

The number of people in the 18-to-45-year-old category has risen from 34 in 2017 to 139 in 2021. All this is unfolding against the reality that 90% of people who attempt suicide and survive do not die of suicide. The desire to die is often a fleeting one, based in shifting circumstances and volatile emotions. Yet the Canadian government is choosing to encourage people to follow that desire (or, as Victoria and Joan Cowie are experiencing, that perceived necessity) to die without offering any safeguards or alternatives. 

There is a tiny shred of hope; in October, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Belgium, another country going all-in for death-on-demand, had violated the right to life of Godelieva de Troyer in 2012 with her euthanasia. The court did not overturn Belgium’s laws permitting euthanasia, but the ruling cracks open the door for a full-throated defense of the vulnerable, the ill, the aged, and the poor against government-sponsored death. This is a struggle that calls on every single person–American, European, or Canadian–who lives in a nation that permits euthanasia to speak out, to expose the truth about this coercive practice, and to proclaim instead a culture that cares for life.