Canada legalized assisted dying in 2016, after the Supreme Court ruled that banning it violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The program is called medical assistance in dying — MAID — and a decade later it has become one of the largest and most controversial end-of-life programs in the world.
In 2024, 16,499 Canadians died through MAID, according to Health Canada's Sixth Annual Report, released in November 2025.
That's about 5% of all deaths in the country — roughly 1 in every 20. Since legalization, more than 76,000 people have died this way.
Those numbers get thrown around a lot. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently attacked Canada for its high “euthanasia” rate.
The next time you’re around when someone attacks MAID in Canada, or assisted suicide in general, ask them what they would do if their senior dog were diagnosed with cancer, stopped eating, and did nothing but lie around, crying in pain.
If they admit they would euthanize their dog to end his/her suffering, the next question should be:
Why are you against showing the same compassion to a person?
Honest caveat: Most people are going to realize why you’re asking that question and avoid helping your argument by lying — they might claim they would help their dog “remain as comfortable as possible until he/she passes away.”
Regardless, they will understand that you’ve just revealed that, in our society, pets are often shown more compassion and respect than humans.
In the meantime, let’s look at what Canada’s numbers actually mean.
How the Law Works
To qualify, a person has to be an adult, capable of making their own medical decisions, and living with what the law calls a grievous and irremediable medical condition — a serious and incurable illness, disease, or disability, in an advanced state of irreversible decline, causing suffering they find unbearable.
Two independent practitioners have to sign off. The person has to be told about palliative care, counseling, disability supports, and community services first, and must be offered consultations.
There are two tracks:
Track 1 covers people whose natural death is "reasonably foreseeable."
Track 2, created by Parliament in 2021 after a Quebec court decision, covers people whose death is not foreseeable — people who may have years or decades left.
Track 2 carries extra safeguards, including a 90-day assessment period.
Almost everyone who dies through MAID is on Track 1: 15,767 people, or 95.6%, in 2024.
The median recipient was 77.9 years old.
More than 63% had cancer.
About 74% had already received palliative care.
Roughly 4,000 people who applied died before their request was ever completed.
That's the part of the program most people picture when they hear "assisted dying," and it’s not controversial in Canada. Public support has been high for years.
Track 2 Is What the Fight Over MAID Is About
In 2024, 732 people died under Track 2 — only 4.4% of cases, but a 17% jump in a single year.
Look at who they were: Among Track 2 recipients, 61.5% identified as having a disability, compared with 31.6% on Track 1.
A third had lived with their condition for more than ten years.
Nearly 45% listed isolation or loneliness as a source of their suffering, versus about 22% on Track 1.
Half said they felt like a burden on family or caregivers.
Health Canada emphasizes that nobody cited loneliness as their only reason, and that people who mention it typically list seven or more sources of suffering.
That's true, but it doesn't answer the question disability advocates keep asking: what happens when the suffering a person can't escape is poverty, or a wait-list, or an apartment they can't get ventilation in?
In March 2025, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities told Canada to repeal Track 2 outright, saying the country was offering state-funded death to people it had failed to house, employ, or care for.
A coalition including Inclusion Canada, DAWN Canada, the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, and Indigenous Disability Canada filed a Charter challenge in Ontario Superior Court arguing that Track 2 singles out one protected group for assisted death and no one else.
Dying With Dignity Canada, which supports the law, pushed back hard, noting that Track 2 exists because two disabled Canadians went to court for the right not to be excluded on the basis of their diagnosis.
Their answer to structural poverty is to fix the poverty, not remove the option.
Both things can be true. A right you exercise because you have no alternatives isn't much of a right.
The Mental Illness Question
Canada's law currently excludes people whose only condition is a mental illness. That exclusion has been extended twice and now runs to March 17, 2027.
In June 2026, a special joint committee of the House and Senate recommended excluding mental illness indefinitely. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health backed that position, citing the absence of any reliable way to tell whether a mental illness is truly irremediable, or to separate a MAID request from suicidal intent.
The government has signaled it isn't planning changes, and competing court challenges are moving in opposite directions.
How the U.S. Compares
American law is far narrower. Medical aid in dying is authorized in 13 states and Washington, D.C., with New York joining in 2026.
Every one of those laws requires a terminal diagnosis with six months or less to live, and the patient has to take the medication themselves.
There is no American equivalent of Track 2. About a third of Americans live where it's legal at all.
The Suicide and Longevity Numbers
MAID is tracked separately from suicide in Canadian mortality data, and the two aren't the same thing legally or clinically.
But since people ask: Canada's suicide rate has held steady at roughly 11.8 per 100,000, about 4,750 deaths a year. The US rate in 2024 was 13.7 per 100,000, with 48,824 deaths — higher, in a country with nine times the population.
Measurement methods differ slightly between the two, but the gap has been consistent for years.
Canadians also live longer.
Life expectancy at birth in Canada rose to 82.16 years in 2024.
In the US, it reached 79.0 years — a record high, and still more than three years behind.
So the country with legal assisted dying for non-terminal patients has a lower suicide rate and longer lifespan than the country without it.
That doesn't prove MAID is harmless, but it does push back on the claim that legalizing it means a higher suicide rate and collapse of society.
The real lesson is: Canada built a system that treats a person's suffering as real and acts on it.
It hasn't built one that treats their poverty, their housing, or their care the same way.
Canada Looked at Things Our Government Ignores
A federal parliamentary review heard warnings that poverty, inadequate disability supports and social exclusion could influence requests for MAID.
Canada’s National Advisory Council on Poverty has separately reported disabled Canadians describing benefits that fail to cover basic needs and systems that can leave them trapped in poverty.
There’s an enormous moral difference between:
“I’m dying, medicine can’t save me, and I want control over what my final days are like.”
and:
“I could continue living, but I can’t afford the care, housing, assistance, or dignity that would make my life tolerable.”
The first is fundamentally a question of bodily autonomy.
The second may be society abandoning someone and calling it a choice.
