Remember ‘Death Panels?’
Liberals called it a conspiracy theory, and as always, liberals were lying. After years of sub rosa involuntary euthanasia in some European countries, Canada, the world’s leader in medical murder, is rushing to get the practice out into the open.
I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while now, but events, shall we say, have kept distracting me from going there. After all, the growth industry of medical murder is not going to slow down anytime soon, but the current unpleasantness in Minneapolis is an event-driven story.
MAID is expanding most quickly in places with high welfare costs, and especially in places where the state covers a large portion of medical expenses. In France, where social insurance expenses are astronomical and the country is going through governments at a rate that makes a gyroscope look slow, the one piece of legislation the current Prime Minister expects to get through in his term is…MAiD.
Quelle Surprise. As France is rapidly moving into a third-tier power, unable to pass a budget, and watching its wealth per capital fall further and further behind other developed countries, politicians are turning to MAiD.
“It is urgent to act vigorously to reduce our deficit, to control our expenditure and to stabilise our public debt,” she said.
Le Monde retorted: “That certainly will not be the case in 2026.”
With a presidential election looming next year, the government’s limited room for manoeuvre is likely to be squeezed further, according to commentators. France Info, the state radio, said Lecornu was planning little other than emergency subsidies for farmers and a bill to authorise assisted dying, which is by no means certain to win parliamentary approval. It said he had given up hope of implementing the sort of economic reform that the likes of Camby say is necessary.
Killing people to help heal an ailing budget crisis is now on-brand for socialist countries.
Great Britain is in the same position, with the Labour government pushing hard to legalize medical murder, and Canada, the world leader, is trying to expand the practice to people with mental illness. And it has already begun killing people who say they don’t want it.
CALGARY — A woman in her 80s was euthanized through Canada’s medical assistance in dying program (MAiD) with the help of her elderly husband who was “experiencing caregiver burnout,” and experts question whether it was coerced.
According to a report released by the Ontario MAiD Death Review Committee, a woman referred to as Mrs. B experienced complications after a coronary artery bypass graft surgery.
Reported by the Daily Mail, she then opted for palliative care after going into a severe decline, and her husband began taking care of her.
While most MAiD patients have to wait weeks to receive it after being approved, Mrs. B was an exceptional case — within the span of one day, she was assessed, approved, and given MAiD.
This is how it happened — after Mrs. B had been discharged from palliative care and returned to her home, she later requested a MAiD assessment.
Her MAiD assessor noted she still preferred palliative care based on her personal and religious beliefs, and she “wanted to withdraw her request.”
The next day, her husband took her to the emergency department because, according to the report, he was “struggling from caregiver burnout.”
Despite this, Mrs. B was discharged and sent home.
Her husband had also requested placement in a hospice palliative care centre, but was also denied.
Hospice care is more expensive than just killing a patient, so Canada denied it to her. Her husband, who was overwhelmed, went back to the doctor and said he just couldn’t handle it anymore, so they killed the patient.
Supposedly, Canada has not yet ventured into killing people with depression, but that, too, is a fiction. The Free Press wrote about a case in which just such a thing happened. Canada’s suicide hotlines exist less to help people work through their depression and suicidal ideation and are now veering off into helping people off themselves.
On December 18, Margaret Marsilla called her son to say she had given up on trying to stop a doctor from killing him. “I already stopped you once,” she said. “I’m not going to do it again. I don’t want you to keep hating me, so I’m not going to come there.”
Marsilla had just learned that her 26-year-old son, Kiano Vafaeian, was approved for “medical assistance in dying” (MAID), Canada’s government-run assisted-suicide regime. He was blind, struggling with complications from type 1 diabetes, and living in public housing in Toronto. He also suffered from depression.
Vafaeian was not terminally ill—and did not need to be to end his own life. In Canada, MAID patients must show only that they have a condition that is “intolerable” and cannot “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable.” These people often feel beset by enduring illness, unresolved social hardship, and other afflictions, all of which blur the line between medical suffering and the hardships of daily life itself.
I met Vafaeian three years ago, after his mother accidentally found an email that laid out the scheduled date, time, and location of his assisted suicide—just two weeks before it was set to take place at a Toronto facility called MAiDHouse. Shocked, she called the doctor and pretended to be a woman seeking MAID. She recorded the conversation and sent me the tape. The doctor postponed Vafaeian’s scheduled killing, then said he wasn’t going through with it, without explanation.
Vafaeian was furious at his mother, telling me that she had violated his right as an adult to choose death. We stayed in touch for about two years, and he often talked about getting back at her. He also talked about coming to visit me in Ottawa, and I promised to track him down in Toronto someday. He was bright, curious, and funny, with a beautiful smile that immediately put you at ease. He also never gave up on wanting to die.
In 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide is constitutional. The country now has one of the highest rates of medically assisted death in the world: 5.1 percent, or a total of 16,499 deaths in 2024, the latest year for which figures are available. That is not much lower than the Netherlands, where 5.8 percent of all deaths in the same year were by euthanasia. Assisted-death programs in the United States are rare and small. In Oregon, one of the 12 U.S. states where it is legal, assisted suicide accounted for 0.9 percent of 2024 deaths.
I happen to know a person with type 1 diabetes and blindness, and have for years. Surely her life is filled with difficulties that I cannot understand, but just as surely her life is valuable.
I assume that it is also medically expensive, and were she a Canadian, by now the state would love to kill her.
Trudo Lemmens, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Toronto, met Vafaeian in 2022 at an event shortly after my article about him was published. The seminar was attended by physicians, MAID assessors, and policy experts. “The only reason that Kiano was alive when I met him is because his mother had the guts to go public, not because of the medical community that would have ended his life,” Lemmens recalled. “I was standing there, looking around the room, and thinking, This is dystopian.”
Ramona Coelho, a family physician and member of Ontario’s MAID Death Review Committee, said provincial oversight reports increasingly show in general that the person’s suffering appeared to be driven less by medical decline than by loneliness, social distress, and fear of the future. “Young people relapse, and they also recover,” Coelho told me. Allowing government-sanctioned assisted suicide “during periods of acute vulnerability risks mistaking transient suffering for permanent decline.”
Canada now has one of the highest rates of medically assisted death in the world: 5.1 percent, or a total of 16,499 deaths in 2024, the latest year for which figures are available.
Canada’s assisted suicide numbers are almost certain to keep rising. In Quebec, where such deaths now represent 7 percent of all deaths, a provincial law passed in 2024 allows people who have been diagnosed with dementia to preauthorize their future deaths once they lose capacity, even though such requests are illegal under federal criminal law. Quebec sidesteps this by declining to prosecute physicians who act under provincial law.
A parliamentary committee has recommended studying whether to extend MAiD eligibility to “mature minors,” Canadians who are younger than 18 but deemed capable of making their own medical decisions. Wiebe told me that she is shocked assisted suicide isn’t already allowed for “mature minors,” adding that any 17-year-old who went to court would almost certainly be approved under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Killing the aged, the infirm, the mentally ill, and children has, of course, parallels in other times and places. It’s just that, until recently, we considered those times and places barbaric. Now, under the guise of kindness, societies that claim to value human life above all else and proudly proclaim their allegiance to human rights are rushing to embrace these practices.
And not coincidentally, reduce their health care and welfare costs at the same time.
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