100,000 Deaths Later: What Canada's MAID Decade Reveals About Care

In April of this year, Canada officially recorded its 100,000th provision of medical assistance in dying, the government-sanctioned euthanasia program known as MAID. The milestone arrived without ceremony, ten years after the Canadian Supreme Court struck down the country's ban on assisted suicide in February 2015. According to reporting by EWTN News, government data show that assisted dying grew at an annual rate exceeding 30 percent between 2019 and 2022. In 2024 alone, 16,499 Canadians died through the program. By any comparative measure, Canada now records the highest number of assisted suicide deaths in the world.

These are not abstract statistics. They represent a structural shift in how one of the world's most admired healthcare systems has come to frame human suffering, and what it chooses to offer in response.

When medicine redefines its own purpose

The Catholic Christian understanding of the human person begins with a premise that contemporary healthcare policy frequently sidesteps: the person is not reducible to their biological condition. Suffering is real and demands a response — but the response medicine offers shapes, over time, the moral imagination of the entire society it serves.

The Canadian government's own reporting acknowledges that the "vast majority" of those who died through MAID had a "reasonably foreseeable death," while approximately 4.5 percent did not meet that clinical threshold. David Cooke, campaigns manager for the Ontario-based Campaign Life Coalition, described the ten-year mark as "an anniversary to mourn." He argued that a program promoted as an answer to human suffering has "unleashed enormous suffering on Canadian society and on the family and friends" of those who have died through it.[^1] Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, noted one consequence the Canadian data have produced outside Canada's borders: assisted suicide measures have recently suffered legislative defeats in several other national parliaments. "The only good thing about Canada," Schadenberg said, "is the effect Canada is having on other countries."[^2]

Suffering, meaning, and the anthropological wager

The philosophical argument embedded in MAID is ultimately anthropological. It assumes that when suffering reaches a certain threshold, the life containing that suffering loses its claim on medical protection. The program's scope has widened over time, moving toward eligibility criteria that increasingly include mental illness and existential distress rather than terminal physical illness alone.

The growth rate of more than 30 percent annually did not occur because terminal illness suddenly became more prevalent. It occurred because the cultural and institutional scaffolding around the decision to choose death was progressively normalized. Eligibility was extended. Institutional objection was weakened. The psychological distance between contemplating assisted dying and requesting it diminished.

Positive psychology's contribution to this conversation is precise: human beings are notoriously poor at affective forecasting, particularly regarding their future capacity to find meaning in constrained circumstances. Studies on individuals living with serious disability consistently show that their self-reported wellbeing exceeds what able-bodied observers predict for them. The disability paradox suggests that the desire for hastened death, when it arises in the context of new diagnosis or acute suffering, may reflect a transient state rather than a stable preference. Medical protocols that accelerate toward death compress the temporal window within which that preference could be reconsidered.

The Catholic Meta-Model of the person, as articulated by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, insists that human beings are irreducibly relational.[^3] The person is not a closed biological system running toward entropy, but a being whose capacity for meaning, connection, and transcendence remains operative even in the most diminished physical circumstances. Patients who maintain a sense of meaning and spiritual connection tend to report higher quality of life, greater acceptance of physical limitation, and reduced desire for hastened death.

A Catholic framework for care does not deny the reality of suffering. It refuses to accept that suffering's only legitimate resolution is elimination of the sufferer. This distinction is not merely theological — it is clinical and anthropological: it preserves the possibility of accompaniment and meaning-making in precisely the circumstances where those possibilities are most fragile.

What the Canadian data ask of care providers

For Catholic mental health practitioners, spiritual directors, and healthcare professionals shaped by faith commitments, the Canadian numbers are a call to renewed clarity about the kind of care being offered. The question is not primarily political. It is practical and pastoral: what does it mean to accompany a person whose suffering is real and whose future is uncertain?

Case conceptualization within a hermeneutic framework — attending to the client's self-disclosed experience rather than subsuming it within a presupposed explanatory model of mental function and disorder — is itself a form of presence that resists the logic of premature closure.[^4] Resilience research frames this in terms of the conditions under which people discover that life remains worth living: those conditions are relational, meaning-based, and bodily. They depend on the persistent presence of other human beings who communicate, through continued engagement, that the suffering person has not been abandoned.

Hospice care, in its modern form, grew in significant part from Catholic commitments to the dying that refused the binary of aggressive treatment or abandonment. Palliative care, properly resourced and practiced, addresses the same suffering that MAID claims to resolve — through presence rather than elimination. The evidence base for palliative care's capacity to reduce suffering, including the desire for hastened death, is substantial.

One hundred thousand deaths in a decade, in a country of forty million people, represents a scale of institutionalized dying without precedent in peacetime democratic history. The anthropological assumptions encoded in a healthcare system shape the choices its patients believe are available, the choices their families feel authorized to support, and the choices their physicians feel culturally licensed to offer. A Catholic vision of the human person — which holds that every life carries irreducible dignity regardless of its biological condition — is a counter-proposal to a model of care that has shown, across ten years and one hundred thousand deaths, where its logic leads.

The work of building genuinely humane alternatives — robust palliative care, well-resourced mental health accompaniment, and cultural formation that takes suffering seriously without treating it as grounds for elimination — is the most consequential clinical and pastoral project now before us.

References

[^1]: David Cooke, campaigns manager for the Campaign Life Coalition, quoted in EWTN News reporting on Canada's MAID program reaching 100,000 deaths (2025). [^2]: Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, quoted in EWTN News reporting on Canada's MAID program reaching 100,000 deaths (2025). [^3]: Paul Vitz, William Nordling, and Craig Steven Titus, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (2020). [^4]: McWhorter, M. R. (2021). Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and the formation of mental health professionals. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 41(3), 187–207.