At what point will the size of Canada’s so-called “Medical Assistance in Dying” program become cause for alarm? What percentage of our vulnerable, elderly, infirm, or disabled fellow citizens need to choose death (or have it chosen for them) before we feel chastened by our outrageous indifference, and our national conscience is, at long last, pricked? The statistics for 2023—which, curiously enough, were released a full 12 months after the year in question—show a startling number of deaths (15,343), a stark total made all the more troubling by the year-on-year rate of growth (5 per cent). For context, this increase alone is more than the total number of estimated deaths from car accidents (2,004) for the same year in question.
The sheer scale of Canada’s dalliance with death has become an object of scholarly enquiry. A study published last year in the journal, Mortality, showed that Canada and California, despite having similarly-sized populations and having legalized euthanasia in the same year (2016), had radical disparities in the rate at which their populations opted for death: all told, Canada’s rate of euthanasia was 15 times higher than California’s. Why is that startling figure itself insufficient to rattle our nation? How could any country not be shocked by such a large percentage of its own population vanishing—sometimes voluntarily; sometimes not—from the face of the earth?
A closer look at the chilling details of the 2023 report only makes the staggering “growth” of the program more appalling. In our three most populous provinces, the increase was explosive: the average was almost 30 per cent in Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec, with the latter leading the charge to the graveyard. How can a province so concerned with its language, culture, and identity not see the disappearance of the members of its living, breathing heritage as an existential threat? And why, frankly, should any other Canadian in any other province feel any differently?
Despite these staggering numbers—in both absolute and relative terms—and the troubling signal that these figures send about the mental health of our country, no clamor or public outcry arises. In the 18th century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s early work, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was accused of occasioning a wave of copycat suicides. Although this panic was based largely on rumors, the novel was banned in several regions of Europe. Now, however, as suicide is afflicting our country on a truly massive scale, the grim totals of documented medical murder are noted wearily in official reports, and concerns about the import of these figures are acknowledged unconvincingly by bureaucrats at the end of unread footnotes.
The Archbishop of Toronto, Cardinal Francis Leo, deserves credit for decrying the corrosive encroachment of MAiD. In his recent letter to the Health Minister objecting to the growth of this ever-expanding program, he cuts to the heart of the matter: “Hastening death is not a breakthrough in healthcare.” Indeed, there is no equivalence: to offer, on the one hand, years of treatment, therapy, or palliative care and, on the other, a poison that can be administered in minutes — such a situation that cannot last. Our citizenry and our systems are both being corrupted by the immorality of this choice, and it will not be long before the most vulnerable members of our society are dissuaded — first gently, then firmly — from the first option which will, in time, no longer be available.
Death is a great mystery. The finite allotment of mortal days gives meaning to life in all of its seasons. The precious gift of each breath, of each diurnal course of the sun, and of each of the turning year: these are blessings to which the ancients believed not one could be added in contravention of the Fates’ decrees. And, eventually, all of these blessings come to an end: “As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more” (Psalm 103:15–16). Thereafter, follows the great sojourn through what Shakespeare called “the undiscovered country,” a journey that has been imagined by poets throughout history—from Homer’s sullen shades to Dante’s pilgrim souls—which each of us, one day, will undertake without the aid of their imaginings and with only the consolations of family, faith, and a well-lived life.
Death is, indeed, a great mystery—and should we fail to respect it, we plunge into another: the mystery of evil. This is the path that Canada is currently taking, and it will only end in untold horrors. Already, the disabled are disproportionately numbered among the non-terminally ill whose lives are being snuffed out; how soon will their portion rise and then crest, as their population dwindles? Already, the sick and elderly are leaving hospitals and nursing homes for funeral homes—and the former will only become more empty and lonely, and less hospitable, as vulnerable Canadians are increasingly menaced by murder by the very system which should be uncompromisingly devoted to their care. Already, we have doctors providing and proscribing mankind’s ancient enemy, death, as a remedy. Will our country recognize the evil it has embraced before it is irrevocably corrupted by the cold calculation of death-dealing medical boards or simply by the seductive and destructive spiritual sickness of despair?
A single, grim figure is the harbinger of where we are headed. In Ontario, reports from the province’s MAiD Death Review Committee found that there were at least 428 “non-compliant” euthanasia deaths—a figure that represents a little less than half of the total number of homicides for the country of Canada in the same year. And so, as with abortion, evasive euphemisms will be increasingly deployed to camouflage the encroaching practice of legal murder. How many of those 428 “non-compliant” deaths will be investigated? Who is watching the watchmen?
For those of us who remain, there is still time—time to protest, time to campaign, and time to resist our country’s slide into the abyss. But the time is short because, increasingly, in Canada, it is not a time to be born, but a time to die; a time no longer to be healed, but a time to be killed (Eccl 3:2–3).
