The fifth-leading cause of death in Canada is one that didn't even exist just eight years ago.

Medical assistance in dying (MAiD) now follows only cancer, heart disease, COVID-19 and accidents as the leading cause of death among Canadians, according to a new report from The non-partisan Canadian think tank Cardus.

Alexander Raikin’s report From Exceptional to Routine: The Rise of Euthanasia in Canada divulges how the federal government opened Pandora’s box by making assisted suicide increasingly accessible.

Advertisement

Raikin, a Canadian serving as a visiting fellow in bioethics at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., was commissioned by Cardus to document the staggering rise of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) procedures from 2016-2022.

Fastidiously researched and comprehensively compiled, of the significant findings laid bare by Raikin, the standout revelation is how euthanasia deaths per year exploded thirteenfold from 1,018 in 2016 to 13,241 in 2022, he told The Catholic Register . 

“In 2018, Health Canada predicted that Canada would reach a steady state in the number of MAiD deaths at two per cent of total deaths,” said Raikin. “Four years later, Health Canada doubled its steady state estimate (to four per cent), and they assumed it would happen in 2033. However, it turns out that we have already surpassed four per cent of total deaths in 2022.

“So, you have Health Canada, the agency responsible for national oversight of MAiD reporting, having no idea about the number of MAiD deaths happening just months from now, let alone in the future.” 

Canada has emerged with the world’s fastest-growing medical-killing regime in just six years. From Exceptional to Routine states it took The Netherlands, the only other country with a comparable euthanasia rate to Canada’s, 32 years since decriminalization in 1981 for MAiD deaths to cross the three-per-cent threshold. Canada reached this percentage bar in just six years.

Judges and policymakers set the expectation when medically-assisted killing was legalized in 2016 that it would be intended for rare cases.

“We do not wish to promote premature death as a solution to all medical suffering,” said then Minister of Justice and Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould in 2016 when she introduced Bill C-14. This piece of legislation, released months after the seminal Carter v. Canada Supreme Court decision in 2015, allowed euthanasia only for citizens with a grievous, irremediable medical condition and a reasonable foreseeability of natural death.

Even when Bill C-7 emerged in 2021 and removed reasonable foreseeability of natural death as an eligibility requirement, Raybould’s successor, David Lametti, said MAiD is “a very serious decision that is only taken under the most tragic of circumstances and the most personal circumstances.”

Advertisement

According to the report, words have yet to translate into sensible procedures.

“In contrast to the repeated assertions of policymakers and judges since Carter, the clinicians who administer MAiD do not treat it as an option of last resort,” wrote Raikin. “This can be seen from three indicators: the relative frequency of MAiD, the diminishing percentage of denied MAiD requests and the average time used by clinicians to assess and provide a MAiD death.”

Government data revealed that refusals for written assisted suicide requests shrank from eight per cent in 2019 to just a 3.5-per-cent ineligibility rate in 2022.

As for the median interval between request and medical death, patients received the procedure within just nine days in 2021 and 11 days in 2022.

“It has been hyper-normalized in less than a decade,” said Raikin. “We went from a culture that more or less valued life to a culture that values MAiD more than any other kind of health care in Canada. It is a shocking statement, but I believe it is fair.”

He supported this argument by asking Canadians to compare the waiting periods of any other treatment to the lightning-fast request-to-provision timeline for MAiD.

Rebecca Vachon, the director of Cardus’ health program, reacted to Raikin’s research by urging the federal government to take action.

“The systematic underestimation of MAiD in government statements and reporting prevents the public from truly understanding the scale of euthanasia in Canada and just how abnormal its rate of growth has been compared to other countries where some form of assisted dying is permitted,” said Vachon. “Governments and the public should carefully consider the safeguards, monitoring and review mechanisms surrounding MAiD.”

Raikin said opponents to assisted suicide could use his report to support efforts to continue advocating against MAiD for individuals solely living with a mental illness from ever being enacted. The federal government has delayed MAiD for the mentally ill until at least 2027, though on Aug. 19 a Charter challenge was launched at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice by Dying With Dignity and two people suffering from mental illness over the government's delay.

Advertisement

Raikin also advocated for parishes and other entities to join disability groups in advocating for the repeal of MAiD Track 2 (Bill C-7).

In the coming weeks, Raikin anticipates that Cardus will unveil a report he has authored that will statistically refute arguments made in the Carter v. Canada decision and by other figures that legalizing euthanasia would not disproportionately impact vulnerable groups such as older populations and individuals living with a disability.