“Civil society and States also have a responsibility to respond concretely to situations of vulnerability, offering solutions to human suffering, such as palliative care, and promoting policies of authentic solidarity, rather than encouraging deceptive forms of compassion such as euthanasia.”
― Pope Leo XIV, January 9, 2026, Address to the Diplomatic Corps
On Wednesday, June 17, Canada’s Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying tabled a report in Parliament [1] recommending that lawmakers “indefinitely exclude” people suffering solely from mental illness from eligibility for euthanasia and assisted suicide.
This is a remarkable development. To understand why, it’s necessary to review some recent history.
When the Canadian Parliament first legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide in 2016, under the sanitized label “medical assistance in dying,” or MAiD, mental illness was not considered a qualifying condition. Technically, assisted suicide and euthanasia were restricted to those whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable.”
That changed officially in 2021 when, in response to a Quebec court ruling, Parliament passed Bill C-7, which expanded euthanasia to those whose deaths are not “reasonably foreseeable.” The Senate then amended the bill to go further still, so that those suffering solely from mental illness would also become eligible after a two-year delay.
That expansion has sat on the books ever since, like a time bomb. Twice – in 2023, and again in 2024 – Parliament scrambled to push back the date. However, the ruling Liberal party made it clear that it was committed to ensuring the change moved forward.
The current deadline is March 17, 2027. On that day, Canadians whose only diagnosis is depression, post-traumatic stress, or anorexia are scheduled to become eligible for a lethal injection, courtesy of the state.
Canada’s Experience is a Warning Globally
But the times, they are a-changin’.
In the years since it legalized MAiD, Canada has become a global warning case for just how quickly it has sped down the slippery slope. As Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition recently told Parliament [2], “Canada is increasingly seen internationally as a cautionary example.”
Schadenberg is correct: Canada’s experience has contributed directly to the defeat of assisted suicide legislation in Scotland, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom. Legislators in those jurisdictions repeatedly pointed to Canada as a warning of what happens when death is accepted as medical care.
And for good reason. Story after story of appalling abuses in Canada have filled news publications the world over: stories of veterans suffering PTSD, the homeless, the impoverished, and the disabled all being pushed towards death by a medical system that seems increasingly uninterested in the difficult business of healing.
Even Canada’s own provinces are pulling back. Quebec amended its law in 2023 to prohibit euthanasia for mental disorders, and just this May, Alberta passed legislation that prohibits euthanasia for mental illness outright and restricts MAiD to those whose natural death is expected within twelve months.
Government Committee Urges Parliament to Halt MAiD Expansion
Now, even significant elements of the medical establishment in Canada are expressing concerns about the rapidity of the expansion. After hearing from psychiatrists, legal experts, and families [3], the government committee did not recommend yet another delay. It recommended that Parliament amend the Criminal Code to exclude mental illness from euthanasia eligibility indefinitely – no new deadline, no new date to prepare for.
Witness after witness told the committee that doctors cannot reliably determine whether a person’s mental illness is truly “irremediable” – that is, whether the sufferer might yet recover – and that they cannot safely distinguish a supposedly rational request for euthanasia from suicidality itself. One physician, Dr. Sandip Singh Gandham, testified that clinicians cannot “reliably distinguish in practice those rare cases where suffering is truly irremediable from those where despair may yet be treatable.” He voiced the fear that “in some cases, we may not be responding to an autonomous, enduring request for assisted dying, but rather to the voice of the illness itself.”
In other words, there is no way to tell the difference between a patient who “qualifies” for death under the law and a patient in the grip of a suicidal crisis who desperately needs help.
“Most psychiatrists in the country are against expanding MAiD solely for mental illness,” Dr. K. Sonu Gaind, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, told the committee. Psychiatrists testified to the incoherence of a profession that “claims it can both prevent suicide in one patient and help finalize suicide in another with the same suffering.” As Dr. Jitender Sareen explained, “[t]his goes to the core psychiatric practice, which is grounded in assessing and treating hopelessness and preventing suicide.”
Perhaps the most chilling testimony came from Dr. Allison Crawford, chief medical officer of Canada’s 9-8-8 suicide crisis helpline. Nearly 70,000 calls and texts to the helpline have mentioned MAiD, she reported. Among those contacts, 74 percent had experienced thoughts of suicide within the previous two days.
Pro-life advocates, psychiatrists, and disability rights groups have been saying exactly this for years. What is astonishing is that the message seems finally to be being received. The damage already caused, however, is vast.
In Just One Decade, Over 100,000 Canadians Have Been Killed
The committee’s report opposing expanding euthanasia for mental illness was tabled on the tenth anniversary of the very day that Bill C-14, the law that started it all, received Royal Assent.
In the decade since, more than one hundred thousand Canadians have been killed [6] by lethal injection. In 2024 alone, according to the government’s own figures, 16,499 Canadians died by euthanasia – 5.1 percent of all deaths in the country, roughly one in every twenty. And it shows no signs of slowing down.
Canada’s Catholic bishops spoke out [7] a week ahead of the anniversary. On June 10, the Standing Committee for Family and Life of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement [8] calling on the faithful and all people of goodwill “to voice renewed concern” about MAiD, “to remain steadfast in opposing euthanasia and assisted suicide, to pray for the conversion of hearts and minds away from this practice, and to be present to persons who are sick and vulnerable.”
Euthanasia and assisted suicide, the bishops emphasized,
consist in intentionally causing or hastening the death of a person who is sick, suffering, disabled, or dying in order to eliminate suffering. Such acts can never be morally acceptable, for they are gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to God, the Creator and Lord of life.
The bishops urged Canadians to renew their commitment to offering help, healing and presence to the sick and dying. The defense of life is “not only a public teaching, but also a daily work of presence: visiting the sick, supporting caregivers, accompanying those in despair, advocating for the vulnerable, and helping build communities where no one feels they must face suffering alone,” they said.
“True compassion does not answer suffering with death, but accompanies those who suffer with hope, presence, palliative care, and relief of pain,” the bishops wrote, echoing Pope St. John Paul II, who warned in Evangelium vitae [9] that “true ‘compassion’ leads to sharing another’s pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear” (no. 66).
Citing the Vatican’s 2020 letter Samaritanus bonus [10], the bishops urged each of us to “give witness at the side of the sick person and to become a ‘healing community’ in order to actualize concretely the desire of Jesus that, beginning with the most weak and vulnerable, all may be one flesh” (Introduction, ¶ 4).
Ten Years of MAiD is NOT a “Cause for Celebration”
The bishops’ words stand in stark contrast with how others marked the anniversary. André Picard, health columnist for The Globe and Mail, marked the occasion with a column [11] bearing a title I would not believe had I not read it myself: “Ten years of MAiD, and suffering averted, is cause for celebration.”
“Thanks to the legalization of medical assistance in dying,” Picard wrote, “more than 100,000 Canadians have been spared unnecessary suffering at end-of-life.” He dismissed the “endless warnings about the ‘slippery slope’ of MAiD” and assured his readers that “the cases that push the boundaries are a path to better legislation.”
The tone deafness of Picard’s column is staggering.
In December, Kiano Vafaeian, a 26-year-old Ontario man – diabetic, partially blind, and struggling with depression – was euthanized in British Columbia after doctors in his own province turned him down. His grieving family alleges [12] that the British Columbia doctor coached him on how to qualify.
In May, Ontario’s medical regulator disciplined a doctor [13] who conducted a euthanasia assessment for a 45-year-old man – suffering from Crohn’s disease, depression, and alcoholism. The assessment occurred outside a Tim Hortons coffee shop, at the man’s request, after which the doctor drove him to the hospital and euthanized him about two hours later.
In Ontario, an 87-year-old man, identified in reports [14] only as Mr. D, cried out “Help me!” again and again during a botched MAiD procedure after the sedative failed to render him unconscious. His family looked on in what was described as profound distress.
Meanwhile, Ontario’s own coroner has documented [15] patients euthanized amid untreated mental illness and addiction, their suffering driven as much by poverty and housing insecurity as by any disease. Even the socialist magazine Jacobin now reports [16] that Canadians with the worst housing instability account for nearly half of those euthanized when death is not imminent.
These cases involve human beings, made in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26-27), dying in terror at the hands of those charged with their care. This is not a “cause for celebration.” This is a travesty.
Meanwhile, the Netherlands Euthanizes a Child
Picard’s dismissal of the “slippery slope” argument is belied by the reality of what occurs in every jurisdiction where euthanasia and assisted suicide have been legalized.
On Monday, June 22, just five days after the committee tabled its report, Dutch Health Minister Sophie Hermans informed her country’s parliament [17] that a child between the ages of one and twelve had been euthanized at the end of 2025.
This is the first known euthanasia death of a child under twelve in the Netherlands, carried out under a 2024 rule change that expanded eligibility to this age group. The Netherlands thereby becomes only the second country in the world, after Belgium, to euthanize a child so young.
Dutch guidelines state that the decision is to be made “in consultation with the parents and, if possible, also with the child.” We are speaking of children too young to sign a contract, to vote, or in some cases even to read – yet somehow old enough, “if possible,” to be consulted about their own killing.
Dr. Joseph Meaney, past president and senior ethicist of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, called the death [20] “clearly a grave ethical violation,” noting the obvious: “a child cannot give informed consent.”
Pray for the Conversion of Hearts
The recent government report rejecting MAiD for mental illness is a positive step. It is likely that it will save thousands of lives [21], as Conservative MP Andrew Lawton put it.
However, even if Parliament adopts every one of the committee’s recommendations, assisted suicide and euthanasia will continue to claim the lives of thousands of Canadians every year. The report is a crack in the wall: an official admission, from inside the machine itself, that the logic of euthanasia cannot be contained.
The admission that doctors cannot distinguish a death wish from treatable despair in the mentally ill raises an important question: on what basis do they confidently make that distinction for the elderly widow, the disabled veteran, or the cancer patient who fears becoming a burden?
“Even in suffering, illness, dependence, and frailty,” the Canadian bishops write, “human life retains its God-given dignity and capacity for love, communion, and grace.” That is the truth the culture of death cannot see, and it is the truth we must proclaim – in our parishes, in our legislatures, and at the bedsides of the sick and the dying.
I invite you to join me in the prayer with which the bishops close their statement:
Loving God, rock of strength for those who trust in you; comforter of those who call on you. Hear the cry of those who suffer from sickness or weakness, and embrace them in your loving arms. Give them peace, and strengthen them with the vision of your kingdom. We make this prayer through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.