By Jonathon Van Maren, a writer and communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

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.

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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.

While assisted suicide may have been envisioned as a rare procedure in the most specific and tragic cases, it is now routinely offered by mainstream medical institutions as a solution to suffering. In 2022, it was revealed that Canadian combat veterans had been offered assisted suicide in lieu of treatment; Veterans Affairs Canada admitted that between four and 20 veterans had been offered euthanasia. This number, however, seems dramatically understated; one Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) veteran Mark Meincke stated that he personally knew of at least five instances. David Baltzer, who served two tours in Afghanistan with the elite Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, was told to consider assisted suicide in 2019 by a government caseworker.

“It made me wonder, were they really there to help us, or slowly groom us to say ‘here’s a solution, just kill yourself,” Baltzer told the Toronto Sun. “I was in my lowest down point, it was just before Christmas. He says to me, ‘I would like to make a suggestion for you. Keep an open mind, think about it, you’ve tried all this and nothing seems to be working, but have you thought about medical-assisted suicide?’”

Baltzer’s experience is far from unique. In 2022, retired CAF corporal and paraplegic Paralympian Christine Gauthier was offered assisted suicide by a caseworker after she sought assistance for a wheelchair ramp or lift for her home, something she had been requesting for five years. Gauthier had not indicated any desire to die.

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It isn’t just veterans. One woman was offered assisted suicide by a doctor as she was about to enter the operating room for her life-saving cancer surgery. Normand Meunier, a quadriplegic man from Quebec, developed severe bedsores due to the lack of a proper mattress during a four-day hospital stay; his partner tried without success to advocate for better care. Meunier was offered assisted suicide. Citing his pain and lack of treatment, Meunier was euthanized on March 29, 2024. Scores of other examples could be cited.

Though the law in principle allows for euthanasia to be administered as a ‘treatment’ for mental illness, the Liberal government in Canada has delayed implementation until 2027 due to massive pushback from the public, suicide prevention groups, and disability rights organizations. If that expansion is not cancelled entirely, the scale of Canada’s euthanasia crisis will increase dramatically. Approximately one in five Canadians suffer from a mental health problem or illness; about 50% of Canadians by age 40. In 2021, about 4.3% of Canadians reported experiencing suicidal ideation; among those aged 18-24, 10%. Across Canada, waitlists for mental healthcare are months or often years long.

Many Canadians have discovered that the legalization of assisted suicide has created a system that renders them helpless to protect their loved ones. An Ontario father discovered that his daughter had died by euthanasia when a friend called to tell him; the family didn’t even have the chance to say goodbye. British Columbian Alan Nichols, who suffered from severe depression, was taken to the hospital for a suicidal ideation. He was euthanized. As his devastated brother Wayne put it: “They killed our brother.” The sole reason for euthanasia cited on his application: hearing loss.

Those stories constitute just a handful of the tragedies represented by Canada’s climbing euthanasia death toll. According to the latest official numbers from 2023, over 60,000 Canadians have been euthanized since 2016, with the annual numbers now reaching 4.7% of annual recorded deaths. Earlier this year, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities called on the Canadian government earlier to halt the legalization of “advanced directives,” refrain from legalizing euthanasia for “mature minors,” and scrap the expansion of eligibility to those with mental illness or disability.

Americans already have homegrown horror stories that should serve as sufficient warning, including cases where availability of treatment, like the Canadian government, pushes patients toward death. In 2008, 64-year-old Barbara Wagner of Springfield, Oregon was diagnosed with lung cancer and was prescribed chemotherapy by her doctor. The drugs were her only chance of survival. The insurance company, Oregon Health Plan, told her they wouldn’t cover the costs—but they would pay $50 for assisted suicide drugs. “It was horrible,” Wagner told ABC News. “I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. But we won’t give you the medication to live.”

That same year, 53-year-old Randy Stroup was similarly denied prescribed chemotherapy treatment by Oregon’s state-run help plan for his prostate cancer. He, too, was offered coverage for assisted suicide instead. “It dropped my chin to the floor,” Stroup told FOX News. “[How could they] not pay for medication that would help my life, and yet offer to pay to end my life?” Public outrage about these cases caused reversals of these decisions, but they exposed the moral calculus that infects every institution when assisted suicide becomes law: Who decides which lives are worth living, and which are not? Who decides what kind of “healthcare” is warranted? Who gets suicide prevention, and who gets suicide assistance?

Americans must recognize that Canada’s assisted suicide laws were sold to the public with the same rhetoric currently being used to sell similar laws in the United States. The reality is that the “slippery slope” is not a fallacious argument, but a demonstrable inevitability, as evidenced by every jurisdiction that has legalized assisted suicide or euthanasia thus far, including the Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain. When suicide becomes healthcare and death a legitimate—and legal—response to suffering, society changes beyond all recognition. Not all jurisdictions move as swiftly—but at the end of the road, Canada’s killing regime awaits.

Assisted suicide does not end suffering. Like other forms of suicide, it merely spreads it.

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A Northern Warning