How many more will die from the "compassion" of Canada's euthanasia regime?

Next year, Canada’s medicalized killing regime, already one of the most permissive in the world, is set to expand again. On March 17, 2023, euthanasia will be available to individuals suffering from mental illness, a move that critics warn will have disastrous consequences for Canada’s most vulnerable citizens. In 2020 a group of 50 religious leaders, including the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, warned: “Offering euthanasia or assisted suicide to those living with a disability or chronic illness, but who are not dying, suggests that living with a disability or illness is a fate worse than death. This will create certain pressures to accept such lethal procedures, putting the lives of these Canadians at greater risk in what is now a new regime that sees certain lives can be ended.”

But it is not only people of faith who object to the expansion of this “right” to those who do not face imminent death. In 2021 three human rights experts from the United Nations sent a formal letter to the Canadian government warning that the move would “potentially subject persons with disabilities to discrimination on account of such disability.” Tim Stainton, the director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, has called MAID “the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.” …

In Canada, where the cost of living is rising faster than welfare spending and the health care system has been crippled by the Covid-19 pandemic, some may be tempted to see euthanasia, like many things that come from the evil spirit, as a solution to a seemingly intractable problem—and thus be distracted from or ignore the harder task of investing in palliative care, affordable housing and the mental health care system. But no individual or society gets a free pass when it comes to caring for our fellow citizens, especially the most vulnerable among us. How high must the death toll rise before Canada reconsiders the cost of its so-called compassion?