wrote. “When a hospice placement request was rejected, her husband, who had been assessed as struggling with ‘caregiver burnout’ asked for an urgent MAID assessment. She was euthanized that day.”
Nor does the state appear to care much about enforcing its own rules.
The Toronto Globe and Mail this week reported on a case involving a 45-year-old who suffered from Crohn’s disease, whose doctor approved him for death at a meeting in a coffee shop, and then followed up with dozens of text messages encouraging him to go through with the euthanasia, including one bashing family members who opposed him committing suicide. The doctor even drove him to the facility to administer the fatal drug cocktail.
The same doctor had also declared a patient dead only to have her start breathing again, requiring him to return to finish the job.
A professional review board concluded that the doctor “displayed a lack of judgment, dealt with patients in a way that risked looking like coercion, and kept inadequate records.”
His punishment? He was issued “a caution,” which doesn’t even count as a disciplinary action.
One of the 45-year-old’s family members told the Globe and Mail: “I am horrified that the college has not stopped him from practicing. What does it take?”
People trying to get actual medical care in Canada, meanwhile, are forced to wait in interminable lines.
According to the Fraser Institute, which for years has been tracking wait times imposed by Canada’s nationalized health care system, patients in 2025 were waiting for more than a million procedures. In some provinces, the average wait time between referral by a general practitioner to treatment by a specialist is more than a year.
This isn’t unique to Canada. Every country that promises “free” healthcare makes people pay in time and suffering. It is the medical equivalent of the bread lines in the old Soviet Union.
So it’s no wonder the Canadian government is eager to make death easy. It costs almost nothing to euthanize someone, the dead don’t rack up medical bills, and with them gone there are fewer people waiting for care. From a government beancounters perspective, the more suicides the better.
Gruesome as this is, it is exactly what will happen here if people are foolish enough to fall for the promise of “free” “universal” healthcare.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
I & I Editorial Board
The Issues and Insights Editorial Board has decades of experience in journalism, commentary and public policy.
