MAiD Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

By age 40, around half of Canadians will suffer or have suffered from mental illness, according to the Canadian Mental Health Association. The other half will have someone close to them who has.

Canada’s MAID (medical assistance in dying) law is scheduled to expand to make people who suffer solely from mental illness eligible for MAID on March 17, 2027. While Canada’s approach to mental illness importantly focuses on mental health care, the expansion of MAID threatens to significantly alter that approach.

The death of 26-year-old Kiano Vafaeian by MAID on Dec. 30, 2025, is emblematic of what Canadians can expect to become commonplace in the coming years.

Vafaeian, who had diabetes and whose natural death was not foreseeable, found that Vancouver physician Dr. Ellen Wiebe was willing to end his life. The young man had been doctor shopping before he found her.

Blindness, autism, diabetes, obesity, and ADHD have been given as reasons for killing young people.

Last month, a 26-year-old Ontario man, Kiano Vafaeian, was euthanized because of his blindness, type 1 diabetes, and depression. His mom tried to stop him from pursuing euthanasia, but she later gave up, saying she didn’t want her son to “keep hating” her.

And in 2024, a 27-year-old woman was euthanized in Canada despite pleas from her father that she was “generally healthy” and had only been diagnosed with autism and ADHD. The woman claimed physical ailments, but her father said these simply resulted from “undiagnosed psychological conditions.”

A Canadian family has been left heartbroken and angry after a 26-year-old diabetic and blind man died of ‘physician-assisted suicide’ – three years after they blocked his request for euthanasia.

Margaret Marsilla had been successfully able to prevent her son Kiano Vafaeian from dying under Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program back in 2022.

She noted that Vafaeian did not suffer from any terminal illnesses. He was just blind and struggling with complications from type 1 diabetes as well as mental health issues.

After Parliament legalized assisted suicide in 2016, 2,838 Canadians killed themselves with the help of doctors the following year. By 2024, that number had risen almost six-fold to 16,499.

Assisted suicide (euphemistically mischaracterized as medical assistance in dying, or MAID) is now the fourth-largest cause of death in Canada, accounting for 5.1 percent of Canadian deaths in 2024, and a shocking 7.9 percent of deaths in Quebec. After the Netherlands, Canada comes in second place as the global leader in assisted suicide, even dwarfing ever-progressive Belgium, where assisted suicide was responsible for 3.6 percent of deaths in 2024.

A senior U.S. health official is sounding the alarm after explosive revelations that Canada’s government-run euthanasia program is now intertwined with organ harvesting, calling it a “strange new horror” that should terrify the world.

Jim O’Neil, the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, blasted Canada’s so-called Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program.

O’Neil responded after reports confirmed that organs are being taken from patients who are medically euthanized.

Societies occasionally reach a threshold so significant that it demands direct attention, regardless of legal or bureaucratic framing. Canada’s current approach to assisted suicide, especially in cases involving mental illness, represents such a threshold. Recent federal data indicate that more than 16,000 assisted suicide cases are approved annually in Canada, with an increasing proportion involving individuals with mental health challenges. This trend highlights the urgent need for policy reassessment and underscores the critical importance of addressing this issue.

This week a judge of the B.C. Supreme Court (reminder: that’s a superior trial court, not an appellate court) heard a case that has the potential to further expand the Canadian empire of assisted suicide. The new battleground is “institutional religious objections,” or IROs, which is what the pro-euthanasia forces call them because they love acronyms so much. Most Catholic hospitals (and some hospices) have rules against administering euthanasia on the premises, which sometimes leads to very sick people undergoing what Dying with Dignity calls “forced transfers” to other facilities at the eleventh hour. The parents of one such patient are now suing B.C.’s Providence Health Care, the umbrella agency that operates the province’s legacy Catholic health institutions.

A B.C. Supreme Court trial starting this week is challenging the constitutionality of faith-based hospitals in the province opting not to provide medically assisted death for terminally ill patients.

The case stems from the death of a terminally ill woman, Sam O’Neill, who sought medical assistance in dying (MAiD) while receiving care at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver.

On Wednesday, a British man was jailed for 14 years for selling poisonous chemicals online to allow people to commit suicide. Miles Cross sold the fatal drugs to four people, two of whom, tragically, have since died as a result. In court he appeared to defend his actions, arguing that he simply wanted to “help others end their lives”.

Most Canadians disagree strongly with the concept of euthanasia for babies. We know this because every time the topic comes up, the public’s response is one of instant horror. So why does it keep coming up?

A medical assistance in dying (MAID) study exposes how MAID lobby groups may be attempting to influence policy in Canada — through the publication of medical studies.

A study on patients who were forced to transfer out of faith-based hospitals to receive medical assistance in dying (MAID) claims this caused “unnecessary suffering” for those who had to be transfered.