Critics are raising the alarm that Canada’s rapidly expanding Medical Assistance in Dying program is quietly functioning as a cost-control tool for an aging population and strained health-care system. With 16,499 MAiD deaths in 2024 — accounting for over 5% of all deaths — experts point to a troubling pattern: recipients are disproportionately elderly, disabled, and vulnerable. As wait times for specialists drag on for months and the over-85 demographic explodes, some fear assisted death is being treated as an efficient “overflow valve” rather than a last resort.
Bioethicist Alexander Raikin and demographer Lyman Stone argue this shift is no accident. Canada offers some of the lowest disability supports in the developed world while maintaining highly permissive MAiD rules. Stories continue to emerge of patients with non-terminal but expensive conditions being steered toward death. Meanwhile, the federal government pushes to expand eligibility even further. This is not compassion — it is a grim reflection of a system that would rather offer suicide than fix chronic underfunding, long queues, and poor support for the vulnerable.
True North has consistently opposed this trajectory. Every life has inherent worth, and governments should not be in the business of normalizing death as a budget solution. When a country turns to state-facilitated suicide to manage health-care costs and demographic pressures, it reveals deep failures in policy and moral priorities. Instead of expanding MAiD, Canada should focus on real reforms: shorter wait times, better elder care, stronger disability supports, and a culture that affirms life even when it is difficult or expensive.
This should serve as a cautionary tale, including for American states watching the Canadian experiment. True North will keep pushing back because treating human lives as line items on a balance sheet is unacceptable. Canadians deserve better than a system that offers death when it cannot deliver care.
