FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 2, 2025
“MAiD now accounts for 5.1 percent of all deaths in Canada – one in every 20 deaths was due to MAiD in 2024, with a total of 16,499 MAiD deaths reported by Health Canada’s latest Annual Report. Canada’s MAiD deaths as a percentage of total deaths remain the second highest in the world. So, Health Canada’s report confirms what Alexander Raikin laid out in a Cardus report last year: MAiD has gone from exceptional to routine. This is a far cry from the expectations established by courts and political leaders in legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide.
The data also point to dramatic growth in reports of social suffering. Almost 58 percent of Track 1 MAiD recipients and more than 63 percent of Track 2 recipients reported ‘emotional distress/anxiety/fear/existential suffering’ in 2024, a significant jump from around 39 percent and 35 percent respectively in 2023. Meanwhile, almost of half of those who died by MAiD in 2024 reported feeling like a burden on family, friends, or caregivers, maintaining the alarmingly high levels of previous years.
While it is a relief to see the year-over-year growth rate of MAiD decreasing, we do not yet know the effects of Quebec’s expansion of MAiD through allowing advance euthanasia requests or the effects of MAiD’s forthcoming expansion to those with mental illness as a sole underlying condition in 2027.
And although Health Canada reports that almost three-quarters of MAiD recipients received palliative care, this data means very little without an assessment of the adequacy or comprehensiveness of these services. Moreover, when a third of MAiD recipients who required and received palliative care only had it for less than a month, it raises serious concerns about the timeliness of the palliative care they received.
Palliative care should be provided at the point of diagnosis of a life-limiting or life-threatening illness or condition, but we simply don’t know how many Canadians received palliative care before requesting a MAiD death. In other words, if palliative care is only provided after a MAiD request due to what a patient considers ‘unbearable’ suffering, then it seems like palliative care is too little and too late in many cases.”
- Rebecca Vachon, Health Program Director at Cardus
MEDIA INQUIRIES
Daniel Proussalidis
Cardus – Director of Media and Public Relations
613-241-4500 x508
media@cardus.ca
Cardus – Imagination toward a thriving society
Cardus is a non-partisan think tank dedicated to clarifying and strengthening, through research and dialogue, the ways in which society’s institutions can work together for the common good.