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(LifeSiteNews) — Death by doctor-assisted lethal injection, under the title Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), now accounts for over 5 percent of all deaths in Canada.
In November, Health Canada published the Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying, which tracked the expansion of euthanasia in 2024, with 16,499 Canadians receiving MAiD, amounting to 5.1 percent of the total deaths in Canada.
“The Government of Canada will continue its work to help ensure that the legislation on MAiD reflects the needs of people in Canada, protects those who may be vulnerable, and supports autonomy and freedom of choice,” the report asserts.
Health Canada noted that MAiD is not considered a cause of death by the World Health Organization and, therefore, “the number of MAiD provisions should not be compared to cause of death statistics in Canada in order to determine the prevalence (the proportion of all decedents) nor to rank MAiD as a cause of death.”
However, the government agency did admit that 16,499 people received MAiD in 2024, which amounted to 5.1 percent of “people in Canada who died.”
The report noted that that was “a small (0.4%) increase from 2023,” adding that “this percentage may change with final counts of deaths in Canada from Statistics Canada.”
Notably, the year-over-year increase was 6.9 percent, a significant slowdown from prior years, such as the 36.8 percent increase from 2019–2020. Health Canada suggested that MAiD provisions are beginning to “stabilize,” though long-term trends require more years of data.
According to the data, 95.6 percent of the deaths were Track 1, meaning those whose death was foreseeable, compared to only 4.4 percent being Track 2 requests, which end the lives of those who are not terminally ill but have lost the will to live due to their having chronic health problems.
“Although Track 2 provisions represented 4.4% of MAiD cases in 2024, they represented close to a quarter (24.2%) of all MAiD requests that were assessed as ineligible,” the report stated.
At the same time, internal documents from Ontario doctors in 2024 that revealed Canadians are choosing euthanasia because of poverty and loneliness, not as a result of an alleged terminal illness.
The report further revealed that 63.6 percent of the Canadians who were euthanized reported cancer as their underlying medical condition.
Currently, wait times to receive genuine health care in Canada have increased to an average of 27.7 weeks, leading some Canadians to despair and opt for assisted suicide instead of waiting for medical aid. At the same time, sick and elderly Canadians who have refused to end their lives have reported being called “selfish” by their providers.
Meanwhile, the Liberal government has worked to expand euthanasia 13-fold since it was legalized, making it the fastest growing euthanasia program in the world.
The most recent reports show that euthanasia is the sixth highest cause of death in Canada; however, it was not listed as such in Statistics Canada’s top 10 leading causes of death from 2019 to 2022.
Asked why it was left off the list, the agency said that it records the illnesses that led Canadians to choose to end their lives via euthanasia, not the actual cause of death, as the primary cause of death.
