Canada Is Preparing to Euthanize the Mentally Ill

April 24, 2026  ·  Rouleau, Saskatchewan

Canada has now recorded 76,475 deaths through Medical Assistance in Dying since the program's inception in 2016. In 2024 alone, 16,499 MAID provisions were reported in Canada, accounting for 5.1 percent of all deaths in the country.¹ That figure did not arrive by accident. It arrived by design: through a decade of deliberate, incremental expansion of eligibility criteria, driven by a government and a medical-legal establishment convinced that death is a solution to suffering rather than an admission that the state has failed to address it.

In 2016, the program was narrow. It applied to those whose natural death was reasonably foreseeable. By 2021, Bill C-7 expanded it to include those suffering from grievous and irremediable conditions even where death was not on the horizon. And now, eligibility for MAID for persons suffering solely from a mental illness has been set for March 17, 2027² — meaning that a Canadian whose only diagnosis is depression, PTSD, an eating disorder, or a personality disorder may, within the year, be legally put to death by a medical professional.

The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, in an April 2025 report, expressed extreme concern with Track 2 MAID, calling on the Canadian government to repeal it entirely, including the 2027 expansion for mental disorders as a sole underlying condition.³ They described how removing the requirement for a "reasonably foreseeable death"⁴ creates the impression that if persons with disabilities are suffering, the state considers their death a valid outcome. This is the United Nations speaking, not just us.

The question every Canadian must answer honestly is this: when a person with a mental illness chooses death, is that a free and autonomous choice — or is it a choice shaped by poverty, by inadequate care, by a system that cannot or will not provide what they need to survive? An estimated 25-30 percent of disabled Canadian adults live in poverty.⁵ Social support payments differ a cross provinces but are often below the poverty threshold; New Brunswick offers as little as $705 per month.⁶

In August 2022, Vancouver Coastal Health asked patients seeking mental healthcare for suicidal ideation if they would like to consider MAID.⁷ A hospital systemically offered death to suicidal patients. The institution later called it a "risk assessment" method. In February 2024, a 27-year-old woman with autism was scheduled for euthanasia in Alberta. Her father sought a temporary injunction through the justice system to prevent her death.⁸

A majority of Canadians do not support MAID for mental illness: only 42 percent believe mental illness is a good reason for a person to request it.⁹ And yet the federal government has twice delayed rather than cancelled this expansion, leaving it dangling over the heads of the country's most vulnerable citizens like an administrative inevitability.

On June 20, 2025, MP Tamara Jansen introduced private member's Bill C-218 in the House of Commons to permanently prevent euthanasia for mental illness alone.¹⁰ It deserves every vote it can get across every party. The expansion of MAID to mental illness is not compassion. It is the state washing its hands of the hard, expensive, unglamorous work of actually caring for its citizens and calling it autonomy.

A civilisation that offers its mentally ill an efficient death rather than adequate treatment is not progressive. It is barbaric.

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