March 7, 2026
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HERE'S MY TAKE
Next week, the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying is expected to resume its important work, which is meant to help Parliamentarians define the contours of future Canadian MAiD policy. In anticipation of that work, Cardus, a non-partisan think tank, is offering this briefing memo, which takes note of the cultural shifts around MAiD, and analyzes related policy developments.
Premier among MAiD-related cultural shifts is this Globe and Mail editorial. When Canada’s newspaper of record opens its own editorial with the words, “There is no right to die in Canada,” something has clearly shifted. The cultural winds around euthanasia and assisted suicide are no longer blowing in just one direction.
That’s very significant. More than that, it’s surprising. Typically, Canadian mainstream media outlets do the opposite. They use sympathetic characters experiencing deep suffering to argue for ever expanded “medical assistance in dying,” or MAiD.
But the Globe and Mail didn’t do that in its late-February editorial. Instead, it harnessed all its editorial power to remind us how far off-course the country’s MAiD regime has gone.
Now, the Globe’s editorial board didn’t disagree with the 2015 Supreme Court of Canada decision that overturned the blanket ban on doctors helping (or causing) their patients to die. Yet, it still trenchantly argues that MAiD today looks very different from what Canadians were promised almost 11 years ago.
That’s a point that’s well worth making.
Consider what researcher and journalist Alexander Raikin found in his Cardus report on the court decisions that opened the doors to euthanasia and assisted suicide:
So, yes, the Globe is right. Canada’s MAiD regime is badly off-course. And it’s heartening to see cultural leaders noticing that fact.
It’s not just that the editorial board is seeing reality for what it is. They’ve also uncovered some very telling data. Parliament’s decision in 2021 to remove the 10-day mandatory waiting period for MAiD requests where natural death was “reasonably foreseeable” had a very real effect.
The 10-day waiting period allowed time for people to change their minds about wanting to die. But the Globe notes “withdrawn requests were less common in 2024, after the 10-day reflection period was scrapped, than in 2018-19 when it was still in place.” By the paper’s count, had there been time to reflect on their decision, there were about 100 people in 2024 who died via MAiD who might have had second thoughts and withdrawn their requests.
Dr. Rebecca Vachon (PhD), health program director at Cardus, says those numbers may be just the tip of the iceberg.
“If anything, the situation is more dire than the Globe realizes,” Rebecca tells me. “We’ve already reached the point where the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario is now reporting that almost five percent of Ontario’s Track 1 MAiD deaths in 2023 happened on the same day or next day of the request. This raises further concerns about the hastiness of decision-making around MAiD requests.”
Frankly, it’s an understatement to say we’ve come a long way from 2021. Back then, Parliament was still considering the removal of the 10-day safeguard and the expansion of MAiD eligibility and more than 1,500 doctors had signed an open letter opposing those changes.
“We are very concerned that removing the 10-day reflection period and other safeguards will lead to an increase in coerced or tragically unconsidered deaths,” warned the signatories.
Doubtless, the removal of the 10-day waiting period and the expansion of eligibility criteria help explain why Canada’s already high rate of MAiD deaths only picked up speed after 2021. And that’s part of the reason we have called for reinstating critical safeguards.
An additional safeguard would be the end of doctor shopping for those seeking MAiD. The requirement for two assessors to approve a MAiD request “is rendered essentially meaningless,” writes the Globe’s editorial board, “if when one assessor answers no, patients can simply continue seeking additional opinions until arriving at a second yes.”
We couldn’t agree more.
One form of doctor shopping involves going to a different province to find someone who’ll approve your MAiD request if you’ve been declined in your home province. So the Globe is on record calling for other provinces to emulate Quebec, where MAiD is only available to those with a valid provincial health card, which typically means you’re been a resident there for at least three months.
This issue isn’t theoretical.
One of the most infamous cases of inter-provincial doctor shopping is the case of 26-year-old Kiano Vafaeian in December 2025. Denied MAiD approval by doctors in his home province of Ontario, Vafaein—who suffered from diabetes, vision loss, and depression, according to media reports—travelled to British Columbia. That’s where he received quick approval of his request, dying at the hands of Dr. Ellen Wiebe.
That’s no way for a health system to deal with life and death decisions. So, it’s heartening to read the Globe calling doctor shopping for MAiD what it is: the loophole on second opinions. This isn’t what the courts or our leaders envisioned. Our leaders need to close that loophole.
Remarkably, the Globe also puts its finger on another brewing disaster in Canada’s MAiD regime: the expansion of euthanasia and assisted suicide for reasons of mental illness.
Let’s not forget, extending MAiD to those suffering solely from a mental illness was slipped into a government bill by the Senate in 2021. It wasn’t official government policy. It never received proper Parliamentary scrutiny. So, it’s no wonder why it has been repeatedly delayed and why its impending legality as of March 2027 remains highly contentious.
In announcing the delay to 2027, the then-health minister, Mark Holland, said, “The system needs to be ready and we need to get it right. It's clear from the conversations we've had that the system is not ready and we need more time."
What’s remarkable about that Globe’s editorial is that it argues (correctly) that the “system” can never be ready to extend MAiD to those suffering solely from a mental illness. The reason is simple: mental health experts just can’t know with any certainty which patients could recover or see major improvement with treatment, and which couldn’t.
“The legal and medical systems should be searching for ways to help those Canadians to live more fulfilling lives, not for ways to kill them,” concludes the editorial board.
The Globe’s conclusion about helping Canadians suffering from mental illness to live, is a great starting point. In practical terms, Rebecca Vachon has some insight on what that means.
“The government’s priority should be measures that help Canadians live with dignity, including ensuring universally available, high-quality palliative care, as well as addressing needs like housing and supports for those with physical disabilities and mental disorders,” she says.
Rebecca, of course, is right to highlight housing as one part of a better response to mental illness. Walk through any downtown core in Canada. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that the front line in MAiD for mental health could well be our homeless neighbours.
Naturally flowing out of all this, the Globe argues that “funding for palliative care must be at adequate levels.” By its count, more than 800 Canadians might have chosen death because the healthcare system didn’t provide them adequate palliative care. The editorial is clear that “even one instance of such a grotesque conundrum is an unacceptable tragedy” and that no one “should choose death because we refuse to pay for their care.”
Funding palliative care is indeed an issue. In the summer of 2025, Rebecca Vachon wrote in a Hamilton Spectator op-ed article that Ontario was 33 percent short of its minimum target for palliative care beds.
“Ontario isn’t falling short in palliative care because it can’t afford anything better,” Rebecca wrote at the time. “It’s falling short because palliative care hasn’t been a high enough priority for provincial governments of all stripes going back decades. Although Ontario adopted a provincial framework for palliative care in 2021, subsequent public reporting from the province on implementation and outcomes is either non-existent or near impossible to find.”
And palliative care is not just an end-of-life issue. Rather, it should come at the time of a diagnosis of a life-limiting or life-threatening illness or condition. Timely, high-quality palliative care not only addresses care needs, it can also support a better functioning healthcare system cost-effectively.
What’s more, better palliative care is holistic palliative care. It recognizes that the end of life involves much more than dealing with physical and biological concerns; it includes social, emotional, and spiritual issues. So, while governments clearly have a role in palliative care, so too do individual Canadians, their natural caregivers, and the many civil society institutions that are well equipped to help.
This brings us to another part of the Globe’s editorial: its plea for better MAiD data collection and reporting by Health Canada. It wants reports quarterly, “or at least with less than an 11-month delay.”
And that data needs to cover MAiD in more detail, as well as palliative care. Rebecca Vachon, along with Cardus senior fellows Dr. Leonie Herx and Dr. Peter Tanuseputro, wrote in Policy Options recently that Health Canada’s Annual Reports provide “illusory” and “unfounded” claims about “adequate palliative care received by MAiD recipients” in Canada. Specifically, the agency’s “annual report provides little detail on the timing, intensity, quality and location of care.”
Without that information, how can we really assess the adequacy of the palliative care received? And how can we be sure that those dying by euthanasia or assisted suicide made a meaningful choice?
These questions are all the more chilling when we consider that the Globe ends its editorial with a not-too-subtle suggestion that some provinces—and possibly some MAiD providers—are operating outside the law with impunity.
The editorial board points to Quebec’s de facto legalization of advance requests for MAiD, which neither the courts nor the federal government has sanctioned. Even so, the federal government simply looks the other way, undermining the very point that the courts and Parliament have made repeatedly: there is no right to die in Canada. Euthanasia and assisted suicide are an exception to the Criminal Code; not medical procedures to which Canadians have a natural or constitutional right.
So, the Globe concludes that if “MAiD providers clearly and willfully range outside those [Criminal Code] carve-outs, then they cannot expect to be exempt from the legal consequences of their actions: charges of homicide or of aiding suicide under the Criminal Code.”
While the Globe is quite right, it’s just skimming the surface. Questionable MAiD cases abound. We’ve already mentioned Kiano Vafaein. But consider also the 2024 case of a 52-year-old man who left a Vancouver psychiatric hospital on a day pass, visited a MAiD clinic that same day, and then died via MAiD. Not surprisingly, the case is before the courts, but only because the family of the man who died filed a wrongful death lawsuit. Other concerns with how mental illness is driving MAiD requests are documented in the reports from the MAiD Death Review Committee within the Ontario Coroner's Office.
Or consider that a decade after leading the parade toward legalized MAiD, the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) now worries that people are dying by euthanasia or assisted suicide because they face “intolerable social circumstances,” not because they legally qualify. That’s “unacceptable” even to the BCCLA, which now argues governments “put in place, actively review, and enforce appropriate safeguards.”
In truth, MAiD can never be made genuinely safe. However, as long as it is legal, the biggest safeguard is to enforce the law so that MAiD providers can’t blithely stretch beyond recognition the exception to the Criminal Code that allows euthanasia and assisted suicide.
But let’s revisit one final part of the Globe’s courageous editorial. After reminding us that there is no “right to die” in Canada, the writers argue, “The law should not enable people to end their lives when they could otherwise go on to live happily and fruitfully.”
From a certain perspective, focused solely on the sovereignty of the individual, the Globe would be right. But its argument rests on the assumption that MAiD should be available when living “happily and fruitfully” is no longer possible.
But should it?
Canada is a pluralist democracy with many sincerely held views on deeply personal matters. The Judeo-Christian view of the person is one view that has played a significant role in the country’s history. The core of that view is that all people, without exception, bear the image of God, from which flow their inherent human dignity and value. These are things no condition, malady, or personal limitation can take away. With that understanding of human dignity, our lives can indeed have meaning and purpose even in the midst of the deepest suffering, pain, and dependence—even when someone believes that happiness and fruitfulness are out of reach.
Let’s consider the flipside. What happens when we accept that our dignity and value are not inherent to who we are, but rather depend on our condition or abilities at some level? Do we not run the risk of valuing human life instrumentally—for what it provides or produces—instead of for its inherent value? When a utilitarian view of life takes cultural hold and MAiD becomes ever more routine, its expansion almost seems inevitable, reaching even those who suffer from mental illness. The resulting increase in death as a “permanent fix” to suffering carries a pernicious cultural change within it: less humanitarian concern for our neighbour. Assistance to live is so much more time-consuming and expensive than a quick and easy death.
The reality of life is that we can never completely eliminate suffering. But as Cory Labrecque, professor of ethics and bioethics at Laval University, argues, we can share in others’ suffering. “[H]uman beings find common ground in the fact that we all suffer, and this in itself evokes—or ought to evoke—a compassion that actively seeks the alleviation of suffering (however limited our capacity may be to do so) and that is sensitive to the different experiences of suffering,” he writes. “Carefully listening to the sufferer, then, is not simply a kindness, nor is it an impossibility when words fail, but is a way into the sufferer’s narrative in order to authentically express compassion, the joining of the wounded and the woundable.”
Ultimately, we accompany those who suffer through their difficulties to their final moments, helping them have a good death.
Clearly, there is cultural and policy work yet to do on the questions raised by euthanasia and assisted suicide. For the moment, though, we can rejoice in the public service the Globe and Mail performed by turning against the cultural tide on MAiD and being willing to question elite assumptions.
Its editorial points out the inconsistencies of Canadian policies.
It uncovers the chilling implications of government inaction and court decisions.
And it lays bare the failures of a health system meant to serve the common good.
In doing so, the newspaper played the very role the news media should play in a functioning democracy. And for that, the Globe and Mail deserves praise. The question now is whether Parliamentarians, and all Canadians, will begin the hard work of repairing the damage MAiD has already wrought.