Canadians with disabilities are disproportionately dying by MAiD despite official reassurances about strict safeguards.
This article was originally published in The Hub on October 10, 2025.
The evidence is piling up: Canadians with disabilities are disproportionately dying by medical assistance in dying (MAiD) despite official reassurances about strict safeguards.
Since legalization, we have seen a lonely Ontario widower in his 70s dying by MAiD because he no longer had meaningful relationships. We have seen Normand Meunier, a quadriplegic man, ask for and receive MAiD in Quebec because he developed painful bedsores from waiting 95 hours for medical care at an ER.
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities blasted the Canadian government on its approach to MAiD, citing evidence of the impact on persons with disabilities.
Meanwhile, clinicians in charge of Vancouver Coastal Health’s assisted-dying team have told patients with chronic pain that choosing MAiD to avoid burdening loved ones can be considered an “expression of love.“
All of this comes despite assurances from politicians and MAiD clinicians that Canada’s MAiD regime “has been carefully designed with stringent safeguards.” It also comes despite the expectations of Canada’s courts, which decriminalized MAiD, that euthanasia and assisted suicide would not put Canadians living with vulnerabilities at inordinate risk.
Now, a new Cardus report, which examined federal and provincial government reports and peer-reviewed medical studies, shows the anecdotal evidence fits into a much larger pattern: disability is “a remarkably common characteristic” among those dying by MAiD.
In fact, from 2019 to 2023, 42 percent of all Canadian MAiD deaths involved people needing disability supports, including 1,017 who never received those supports. And in Ontario in 2023, people with disabilities were the most likely people to die via MAiD. Worse yet, in many cases, they are possibly getting MAiD before they can even access palliative care.
It’s not just physical disabilities.
A study of MAiD deaths between 2016 and 2019 at a tertiary care centre in Toronto found that 39 percent of those requesting MAiD had a documented psychiatric condition, most commonly depression. Patients with a psychiatric condition were much more likely to request MAiD than those without one.
Meanwhile, Canadian MAiD providers report that almost half of the patients they helped die in 2023 reported feeling they were a burden, up 10 percent from the previous year. In that same year, more than 22 percent of their patients suffered from loneliness—an annual increase of 5 percent.
Health Canada’s annual reports also show that MAiD deaths of persons with dementia have increased dramatically. In 2023, a degenerative neurological illness was a qualifying factor in almost 15 percent of Canadian MAiD deaths.
Taken together, all these indicators show that “stringent safeguards” and “scrutiny” are more imagination than reality.
When the Supreme Court of Canada heard evidence of safeguards for assisted dying in other jurisdictions in 2015, it believed that for every 100 MAID deaths, there would be up to 900 other rejected MAiD requests.
This was supposed to be an assurance that MAiD requests are not rubberstamped and go through rigorous pre-approval safeguards. Yet for every 100 MAiD deaths in Canada in 2023, only up to 28 other MAID requests weren’t approved.
This is a far cry from what Canadians believe the MAiD system allows. Even the majority support for legal MAiD came with the caveat that MAiD must be a last resort—something the law has never required.
This data should raise questions about the choices Canadians have in living—and not just in dying. We should consider the adequacy and accessibility of care, particularly for those living with disabilities and mental illness.
Further, Canada’s rising rate of MAiD deaths should prompt an urgent review of how safeguards for MAiD in Canada are functioning—or failing. Given what we know today, the federal government cannot claim that MAiD does not involve people who are burdened by psychological, social, or physical vulnerabilities. More than that, they cannot simply allow MAiD eligibility to expand again in 2027 to cover those who are suffering solely from a mental illness.
This disproportionate impact on vulnerable Canadians is the opposite of what the courts expected and the federal government promised.
MAiD has gone far further, far faster than public authorities anticipated. The federal government should halt the expansion and create genuinely stringent safeguards.
Because Canadians deserve much, much better.
- Rebecca Vachon is the health program director at Cardus. Alexander Raikin is a visiting fellow in bioethics at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
October 10, 2025
