After 10 years of euthanasia in Canada, activists detect a shift, say much work to be done

 

CNA Staff, Feb 25, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).

A decade after euthanasia became legal in Canada, activists there say the political and cultural winds are shifting in favor of life — but there is still plenty of work to be done to roll back the country’s permissive assisted-dying regime.

In February 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Carter v. Canada that the country’s prohibition on assisted dying was illegal, allowing for the first time that doctors in Canada could assist in killing patients who were suffering with incurable medical conditions.

The court delayed implementation of that ruling for over a year, with the practice ultimately becoming legal in June 2016.

In the decade since the court’s ruling, euthanasia has exploded in popularity there. Health Canada’s fifth annual medical assistance in dying (MAID) report, released in December 2024, revealed that euthanasia accounts for nearly 1 in 20 deaths in the country, with 15,343 people euthanized by medical officials in Canada in 2023, out of a total of just under 20,000 requests.

Canadian pro-life activists have been working for the last 10 years to roll back euthanasia there, though the practice has become more permissive since it was first legalized, including legislation in 2021 that allowed doctors to begin euthanizing patients whose deaths were “not reasonably foreseeable.”

Alex Schadenberg, the executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition of Canada (EPCC), told CNA that the fight against euthanasia is “a long-term battle.”

“In order to undo the situation completely, we would need to have another Supreme Court of Canada decision,” he said. “Those don’t happen overnight. That takes a lot of political reality.”

EPCC says it works to enforce prohibitions on euthanasia and “increase public awareness of hospice [and] palliative care.” It also seeks to “represent the vulnerable and, where appropriate, advocate before the courts on issues related to euthanasia and assisted suicide.”

Schadenberg noted that the federal government in its implementation of MAID went further than the Supreme Court’s Carter decision required.

Activists are treating the fight as a “long-term situation,” he said, but “you need the government to make a change,” and the current liberal government has protected and even expanded euthanasia.

David Cooke, the campaign manager for the Ontario-based Campaign Life Coalition, told CNA that his group has been “fighting against euthanasia since we first heard proposals or suggestions of legalization in the 1990s.”

“Since it’s been legalized, we’ve redoubled our efforts to not get it expanded and, if possible, to get it recriminalized,” he said. The group is working to bring about both political and cultural change, he said.

Canadian laws have grown considerably more permissive on the topic of MAID since 2015. The federal government last year actively began soliciting citizen input for a proposal to legalize “advance requests” in which citizens can prearrange to be euthanized at a time when they are unable to consent to the procedure. The provincial government of Quebec last year began allowing that practice.

And though the national government last year delayed a planned expansion of the program to include individuals with mental illnesses, that expansion is still on the table, with a projected expansion in 2027.

A judge last year, meanwhile, ruled that a Canadian woman suffering from autism had the right to be euthanized by a doctor, though the woman’s father argued that her physical symptoms stemmed from psychological disorders rather than a strictly physical ailment.

Both Schadenberg and Cooke expressed dismay over the country’s expanded euthanasia laws. But both also said the country’s increasingly permissive assisted dying was being met with unanticipated pushback.

“It’s just gotten so out of hand and so insane, there has been enormous public backlash,” Cooke said. He pointed to a case in 2022 in which a woman was euthanized by a doctor after claiming she suffered from “multiple chemical sensitivity,” a controversial and disputed diagnosis that some doctors say may be psychiatric in origin.

“As the number of MAID killings has jumped year after year, and as more stories have come out of hurting Canadians being pushed into euthanasia by a lack of support or by overzealous ‘providers,’ the backlash in the media and among the public has grown,” Cooke said.

Schadenberg, meanwhile, noted a bombshell report last year alleging that, out of hundreds of violations of the country’s controversial euthanasia law over the course of several years, none of them were reported to law enforcement.

The revelation of chronic violations of the law, Schadenberg said, has not engineered a wholesale backlash to euthanasia. But he said it has moved much of the public away from the position that, as he put it, “everything’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

“It’s a whole new question of what can be done,” he said of the shifting public perception.

Pushback has come from some other surprising sources. The activist group that helped legalize euthanasia in the country warned last year that additional government safeguards are needed to combat reports of abuse of the program.

Liz Hughes, the executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, which led the charge in favor of legalization, told the National Post that the government “must put in place, actively review, and enforce appropriate safeguards to ensure that people are making this decision freely.”

In December, meanwhile, the Alberta provincial government said it was considering several possible regulations on euthanasia, including “the creation of a new public agency and legislation to provide oversight” of the euthanasia program as well as “limitations on criteria for MAID eligibility and on MAID as an option for patients.”

At the national level, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has vowed to block the mental health expansion of MAID if he rises to the post of prime minister — a promise Cooke said was a “ray of hope” for life activists there.

Schadenberg said activists “are not at this because it’s easy.”

“We’re committed to preventing the killing of people,” he said.

Cooke, meanwhile, said his group is “working every day to urge our elected representatives to act to defend all human life from conception to natural death,” including through petitions, rallies, and meetings with lawmakers.

“We believe that, with God’s help and by his grace, we will see a change in this country,” he said. “After 10 years of the grim darkness of legal euthanasia, it is only a matter of time before people are drawn back to the light of the sanctity of life.”