In May, two commentators from Quebec suggested on air that a physically healthy 24-year-old woman with intellectual disabilities should perhaps be euthanized. Luc Ferrandez and Nathalie Normandeau, both former politicians, were discussing a scandal in which the young woman was put in a correctional facility due to a lack of other available options. Disability rights advocates were livid. The mainstream press, for its part, didn’t bother to cover the comments. Canadians may have become numb to the horrors of medically assisted suicide, but Americans should see the destructive threat building across our northern border.
Americans would do well to consider what is unfolding in Canada because activists are working hard to pass similar laws across the United States. On June 9, assisted suicide passed the New York State Senate and now heads to the governor’s desk despite urgent warnings about its social effects. Assisted suicide is already legal in 12 states—California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia. In California, often presented as a “model” for assisted suicide regimes, the rate of requests for life-ending drugs spiked by 63% in 2022. In Maryland and Illinois, assisted suicide laws are currently being considered. Canada’s regime provides Americans a glimpse of what an institutionalized system of medical assisted suicide could look like—unless these efforts are stopped.
In 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court overturned criminal prohibitions on assisted suicide in Carter v. Canada. In 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, legalizing the euphemistic “medical aid in dying” for adults enduring “intolerable suffering” with a “reasonably foreseeable death.” In 2021, despite opposition from Indigenous leaders, disability rights groups, and hundreds of physicians, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government passed Bill C-7, which removed the “reasonably foreseeable death” requirement and expanded euthanasia to those suffering solely from mental illness and other conditions including disability.
In ten short years, Canada’s euthanasia regime has become a cautionary tale so horrifying that in the UK, politicians pushing for legalization insist that comparisons constitute fearmongering. UK MP Kim Leadbeater, who is championing the legalization of assisted suicide, insisted that what she is proposing is “worlds apart.” This comes as no surprise. Any politician seeking to legalize assisted suicide must now contend with the reality that the so-called “slippery slope” is not a fallacious argument, but a demonstrable inevitability—and Canada proves that the slope is steep indeed.
Canada’s broken healthcare system has guaranteed that the only “treatment” readily available to many is assisted suicide; in fact, it is frequently the only thing sufferers are eligible for. In 2022, 44-year-old Sathya Dhara Kovac died by assisted suicide, but left a scathing self-authored obituary behind. Kovac, who had a degenerative disease, wanted to live longer but could not get the homecare support she needed. “Ultimately it was not a genetic disease that took me out, it was a system,” she wrote. “There is desperate need for change. That is the sickness that causes so much suffering. Vulnerable people need help to survive. I could have had more time if I had more help.”
“The median wait time for a CT scan in Canada was 66 days in 2023,” investigative journalist Alexander Raikin noted in an interview. “A government-funded suicide, meanwhile? Only 11 days in 2022. I don’t know any elective medical procedure in Canada that is as rushed as euthanasia.” Indeed, one 52-year-old man opted for euthanasia after his cancer treatments were delayed until the disease progressed. Dr. Ramon Coelho, an Ontario-based family physician, concurred in a recent analysis of euthanasia in Canada:
Despite its compassionate framing, investigative journalists and government reports reveal troubling patterns where inadequate exploration of reversible suffering – such as lack of access to medical treatments, poverty, loneliness, and feelings of being a burden – have driven Canadians to choose death.
