Is Euthanasia in Canada out of control?

Written by Jonathan Engler on August 30, 2025. Posted in Current News

The Atlantic (of which Laurene Jobs – widow of Steve Jobs – is the chair and lead investor) is not a publication I have generally followed. It is far too “woke” and left-leaning for my own taste

Moreover, in relation to my own interests in the 2020 “event”, at a time when it could have actually made a difference it totally failed to oppose the egregious assaults on individual liberties which formed the “covid response”, only later making a vain attempt to project a more nuanced take on matters.

However, on the subject of state-sanctioned assisted dying, it has actually published a number of excellent thoughtful pieces exploring the ethical (as well as practical) issues posed by these new laws, primarily by citing the example of Canada, where more than five percent of deaths are now “medically assisted”.

A couple of years ago they published this piece1:

That article delves into some of the philosophical and theoretical concerns which Canada’s rapid adoption of “MAiD” (medical assistance in dying) was posing, whilst citing a number of real-world examples.

Fast forward to today; they have just published a detailed follow-up piece2 accompanied by an extremely striking headline:

This piece paints a disturbing picture of:

• demand for MAiD outstripping supply
• apparently limitless expansion of the applicable scope of MAiD
• attendant societal attutudinal changes towards the sanctity of life
• normalisation of MAiD as a legitimate medical specialty – with its experts, workshops and conferences

I highly recommend reading both these pieces. Two things in particular “creeped me out” in the latest article:

Firstly, that clinicians could (and so no doubt will) use their discretion to interpret “resistance” as a symptom of illness (to be overridden) rather than a change of mind:

In Quebec, more than 100 advance requests have been filed; according to several sources, at least one has been carried out. The law currently states that any sign of refusal “must be respected”; at the same time, if the clinician determines that expressions of resistance are “behavioural symptoms” of a patient’s illness, and not necessarily an actual objection to receiving MAID, the euthanasia can continue anyway.

The Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers has stated that “pre-sedating the person with medications such as benzodiazepines may be warranted to avoid potential behaviours that may result from misunderstanding.”

Secondly, that doctors call the process a “provision” or “delivery”:

The two-day conference in Vancouver was sponsored by a professional group called the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers. Stefanie Green, a physician on Vancouver Island and one of the organization’s founders, told me how her decades as a maternity doctor had helped equip her for this new chapter in her career.

In both fields, she explained, she was guiding a patient through an “essentially natural event”—the emotional and medical choreography “of the most important days in their life.” She continued the analogy: “I thought, Well, one is like delivering life into the world, and the other feels like transitioning and delivering life out.”

And so Green does not refer to her MAID deaths only as “provisions”—the term for euthanasia that most clinicians have adopted. She also calls them “deliveries.”

If you haven’t read Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go or seen the film version, you should.

In a dystopian alternative version of the UK many chronic illnesses have been eliminated through medical advances, including a huge expansion in organ transplantation. These are provided by the operation of a “national donor program” which involves bringing up a cohort of specially selected children, whose organs will be harvested when they reach adulthood, for the benefit of society as a whole.

These children are brought up with full knowledge of their fate. Once they’ve made three or four such donations they are fully aware that they will have “completed” (presumably once their heart is required) – but seem to accept this as they have been psychologically manipulated to not question it.

The euphemistic usage of the words “provision” and “delivery” by doctors involved in MAiD made me think very much of this.

Some may think that the example of Canada is an extreme one, and that we (I am in the UK) would be effective in respecting the limits of the application of assisted dying.

However, I have no idea how and why proponents of this “new dawn” over here in the UK can possibly think that we would be uniquely immune to the disturbing “scope creep” seen in Canada and elsewhere.

(I have written a few other commentary pieces on the subject of “assisted dying” which you can find here.)

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