An editor at the Wall Street Journal noted this week Canada’s assisted suicide regime has gone off the rails and is now the fifth leading cause of death in the country.

Canada has undergone a “crash course” in physician-assisted suicide, writes Nicholas Tomaino, furnishing a textbook case of what the slippery slope actually looks like.

In 2015, the Canadian Supreme Court opened the door to physician-assisted dying for those with “grievous and irremediable” medical conditions, but ever since then the bar has been progressively lowered.

Soon the condition that death from a grievous and irremediable medical condition be “reasonably foreseeable” was waived, followed by the elimination of other safeguards and waiting periods.

By 2022, more than 81 percent of petitions for “medical assistance in dying” (or MAID) resulted in death, including for motives as medically insignificant as vision/hearing loss and diabetes, Tomaino observes.

As the number of applications has steadily increased, doctors have become more and more willing to approve requests, and the percentage of denied written requests has fallen from 8 percent in 2019 to just 3.5 percent in 2022.

The upshot is that “what was meant to be exceptional has become routine,” Tomaino writes, citing Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Alexander Raikin.

MAID is now at least the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada, with a reported 13,241 deaths in 2022, up from just 1,018 in 2016. Between 2016 and 2022, a total of 44,958 people have been put to death in the Canadian program.

Thus, both in absolute numbers and when weighed as a percentage of deaths, Canada has the “fastest-growing assisted-dying program” in the world, Tomaino states.

Understandably, the ready availability of physician-assisted dying has also been accompanied by growing pressure on patients to avail themselves of this trap door, he notes, citing the case of one Roger Foley who recorded conversations in which just this sort of pressure was applied.

Many people like to use the term “end suffering,” Foley has said, but in practice, this means, “Don’t help the sufferer, end the sufferer.”

“Canada’s healthcare system wants not only to give up on him, but to compel him to give up on himself,” Tomaino declares.