Canada is on a mission for death

Something sinister is going on in Canada, and they’re not even trying to hide it. Canadian leaders are promoting their Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program with faux heavenly-esque TV commercials—advertising chosen death as a beautiful utopia to vulnerable people in mental and physical pain. 

Soon, Canada will cross a threshold that should make everyone shudder in protest. Canadian authorities plan to expand MAID to allow those with mental illness to choose legal euthanasia. 

Since 2016, when the Canadian government legalized MAID, the country has administered the procedure to tens of thousands of its own citizens. For perspective, know that more than 5% of all deaths in Canada in 2024 were from MAID—more than 16,000 Canadians died this way.

By the end of last month, the cumulative death toll was projected to hit 100,000. Statistics don’t have names, faces, or stories, but each of these people had all three. This tragic number conveys a civilizational message: Life is only valuable when you want it to be. 

When MAID was first legalized, we were assured it would be narrow and tightly controlled, reserved only for those facing imminent natural death or enduring unbearable physical suffering with no remaining options. 

That promise quickly vanished. By 2021, Canada had expanded eligibility to people whose death was not reasonably foreseeable at all. The category, known as Track 2 MAID, expanded the criteria for the program. In Alberta alone, Track 2 deaths increased 136% between 2021 and 2025.

The next expansion is scheduled for March 2027, and it’s devastating. In less than a year, “mental illness” can be the sole underlying condition that makes someone eligible for assisted death in Canada. 

This means that a civilized, Western country will soon offer lethal injection to someone whose primary diagnosis is depression, an eating disorder, or what is diagnosed as a personality disorder—treatable conditions that people recover from regularly.

We’ve already seen people tiptoeing toward expanded death in Canada, after 26-year-old Kiano Vafaeian was approved for MAID—and euthanized—for conditions of diabetes and blindness. His family was against it and doesn’t feel he was in the mental state to make such a decision. 

In Spain, 25-year-old Noella Castillo was euthanized for depression. With MAID’s expansion next year, we’ll undoubtedly see more of this. 

Parliamentarians are justifying the move by saying that any restrictions on MAID will increase suicide rates among the mentally ill. It ultimately amounts to offering a sanitized form of suicide, one that normalizes a barbaric, anti-life practice we should be working to abolish altogether.

But the latest expansion is no surprise. MAID is built on the principle of personal autonomy as the supreme good, and that argument has no natural stopping point. This is the logic that sanctions killing children in the womb for disability or imperfection, discarding frozen embryos deemed inferior, and pursuing a eugenics-driven future sold to us under the banner of eliminating suffering.

Once a society agrees that some lives are not worth preserving, the question becomes: which ones? Each exception creates the logic for the next. In Canada and places like Switzerland and Spain, the answer to that question gets broader every year—and it’s moving toward the United States.

There is some pushback in Canada. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has called for the repeal of Track 2 MAID, and disability advocates in Canada have raised the alarm that their members are being offered death instead of the support and care they need. 

An Ontario physician who works on MAID death review testified in support of restrictions because she saw patients routinely offered assisted dying in lieu of treatment for poverty and social isolation. 

In March, the Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act was initiated. This would limit MAID eligibility in the province to those whose natural death is expected within 12 months, block eligibility for mental illness as a sole condition, prohibit providers from initiating MAID conversations with patients, and protect healthcare workers who refuse to participate. This is a good move, but there aren’t enough people speaking up on it. We need to get loud about this because the United States is not far behind Canada. Seventeen states have introduced Death with Dignity bills or amendments this year. 

As Christian ethicist Gilbert Meilaender has said, “We should maximize care rather than minimizing suffering, which might include eliminating the sufferer.” 

The natural law tradition, which Christians are called to affirm, says all human life has intrinsic dignity—and no government has the authority to dispose of it. This is the minimum moral premise required for a functioning and flourishing society. Without it, vulnerable people are just problems to be managed, suffering a cost-benefit analysis, and death an extension of state power delivered when we’re no longer useful.