Canada is experiencing a significant surge in deaths by euthanasia, according to a report released this week by the Canadian government.
Health Canada’s medical assistance in dying (MAID) report, its fifth annual one, shows euthanasia accounting for nearly five percent of total deaths in the country last year.
Medical officials euthanized an astonishing 15,343 people in Canada in 2023, an increase of 15.8 percent over 2022.
In a bit of irony worthy of the Babylon Bee, the report states that “Health Canada is the federal department responsible for helping the people of Canada maintain and improve their health.”
Health Canada “is committed to improving the lives of all of Canada’s people and to making this country’s population among the healthiest in the world as measured by longevity, lifestyle and effective use of the public health care system,” it adds.
It also declares that the government has laid out “strict eligibility criteria to determine who can receive MAID, and robust safeguards to ensure that MAID is safely provided,” a stipulation some may find self-contradictory.
One of the criteria for eligibility set out by the government states that a patient must have a natural death that is “reasonably foreseeable,” perhaps the lowest bar imaginable since no one has ever been known to live forever.
In its attempt to assess the remarkable growth in euthanasia’s popularity among Canadians, the report points to a number of factors, including greater social acceptance of government-assisted killing.
“An increased awareness of MAID within the care continuum, population aging, and the associated patterns of illness or disease, personal beliefs, and societal acceptance, as well as the availability of practitioners who provide MAID, may all influence the rate of provisions,” the report said.
The report also said that assisted killing “appears to be becoming an area of focused expertise for some healthcare workers,” noting that a small group of 89 practitioners were responsible for 35.1 percent of all Track 1 and 28.6 percent of all Track 2 deaths respectively, the latter group being those whose natural deaths were not “reasonably foreseeable.”
The total number of those who have died under Canada’s euthanasia law since its legalization in 2016 is now is 60,301, the report revealed.
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