In the years since the Trudeau government legalized assisted suicide, Canada has seen a rapid rise in the number of Canadians seeking medical assistance to end their lives, rapidly outpacing peer nations with similar programs.
Canada’s assisted suicide regime has become one of the most permissive and easy to access in the world, allowing the practice to quickly become a leading cause of death in Canada.
A report from Cardus studied the development of Canada’s euthanasia program over the years, beginning with the Supreme Court of Canada case Carter v. Canada in which the court determined that the criminal prohibition on euthanasia and medically assisted suicide was unconstitutional.
Both the Supreme Court and the Trudeau government stated that assisted suicide was intended for rare cases in which a patient is experiencing a high degree of suffering from a condition that will kill them in the foreseeable future.
However, the practice is no longer used as a last resort with amendments to the original assisted suicide legislation making it accessible for anyone who deals with intolerable physical suffering like a disability that’s not terminal.
The report argues that there are few safeguards in the program to prevent unnecessary deaths, demonstrated by the fact that in 2022, 81% of all explicit assisted suicide requests end in a death with only 3.5% of requests being deemed ineligible.
Applicants are seldom made to wait very long to receive suicide services, as the median length of time between request and the euthanization was only eleven days in 2022 and nine days in 2021.
For comparison, the American state of Oregon has a median time between assessment and provision of assisted suicide of 34 days, triple that of Canada’s median wait time despite having a program only available to the terminally ill.
Canada has quickly become an international outlier in the growth of the assisted suicide regime, as the proportion of the population that has died from euthanasia has quadrupled from 2017-2022, reaching 4.2% of all deaths in Canada.
This rate exceeds jurisdictions like the state of Washington, Oregon, Switzerland, and Belgium, all places in which their governments had legalized assisted dying far before Canada had.
Provinces like Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Alberta have an assisted suicide rate that’s lower than the national average below 4% while 5.5% of all deaths in British Columbia are from euthanasia while the rate is 6.6% in Quebec.
Federal data shows that MAiD has quickly become the fifth leading cause of death in Canada, ahead of liver disease and cirrhosis, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and chronic lower respiratory diseases.
The Trudeau government initially legalized assisted suicide in 2016 in response to the Carter v. Canada decision by the Supreme Court. However, the Liberals expanded Canada’s regime in 2021 to allow Canadians whose death is not reasonably foreseeable to access the program and have delayed plans to allow the mentally ill access to MAiD until 2027 pending further review.
