MAID in Canada: Your Doctor Is Not Telling You to Die

All references cited in this article are part of the public record. The assertions and conclusions presented, unless otherwise noted, have not been legally contested. This article is general information, not medical or legal advice.

If you are thinking about suicide, or are worried about someone who is, call or text 9-8-8, Canada's Suicide Crisis Helpline, any time of day or night.¹

There is a line that circulates every time medical assistance in dying comes up in Canada: "Doctors are telling you to commit suicide." It is repeated online, in comment sections, and occasionally by people who should know better. It is also wrong.

Doctors are not telling anyone to die. What they are doing, and what they are required to do, is tell patients about every option available to them, full stop. For a patient who qualifies, medical assistance in dying (MAID) is one of those options. Informing someone of a legal choice is not the same as pushing them toward it, and Canadian law draws that line clearly.

How Canada Got Here

In 1993, the Supreme Court of Canada narrowly upheld the ban on assisted suicide in the case of Sue Rodriguez, a British Columbia woman with ALS. Twenty-two years later the Court revisited the question. In Carter v. Canada, brought in part by Gloria Taylor, who also had ALS, and the family of Kay Carter, who had travelled to Switzerland to die, the Court ruled unanimously on February 6, 2015 that the blanket prohibition violated the Charter right to life, liberty and security of the person.²

Parliament responded with Bill C-14 in 2016, legalizing MAID for adults whose natural death was reasonably foreseeable. After a Quebec court struck down that requirement in the 2019 Truchon decision, Parliament passed Bill C-7 in March 2021, creating two tracks: One for people whose natural death is reasonably foreseeable, and a second, with stricter safeguards, for people whose death is not.³ People whose only condition is a mental illness are not eligible. That exclusion runs to at least March 17, 2027, and in June 2026 a special joint committee of Parliament recommended making it indefinite.⁴

Who Qualifies

MAID is not available on request to anyone who asks. To be eligible, a person must be 18 or older, capable of making their own health decisions, and eligible for publicly funded health care in Canada. They must make a voluntary request that is not the result of outside pressure, and give informed consent after being told about all the means available to relieve their suffering. And they must have a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability, be in an advanced state of irreversible decline, and experience enduring physical or psychological suffering that is intolerable to them and cannot be relieved under conditions they find acceptable.³

Every one of those conditions must be met. Two independent doctors or nurse practitioners must each confirm it.

The Safeguards

For every request. The request must be in writing, signed in front of an independent witness. Two independent practitioners must assess eligibility. The person must be told they can withdraw at any time, in any manner, and must be given the chance to withdraw and must confirm their consent immediately before MAID is provided.³

When death is not reasonably foreseeable. Track 2 adds more. The assessment period must last at least 90 days. If neither assessor has expertise in the person's condition, one who does must be consulted. The person must be informed of the available and appropriate means to relieve their suffering, including counselling, mental health and disability supports, community services and palliative care, and must be offered consultations with professionals who provide them. The person and both practitioners must agree that those options have been seriously considered.³

That is not a system built to hurry anyone toward death. It is a system that requires the alternatives to be put in front of the patient, in writing, before anything else happens.

The Catch-22: You Have to Be Capable to Choose

Here is the part many people do not realize. MAID is a decision that only a capable person can make, and the law requires that capacity at both ends. You must be capable of making the decision when you request it, and in most cases you must still be capable, and give express consent, at the moment it is provided.³

That means you cannot wait until you are unconscious, or until dementia or a brain tumour has taken away your ability to decide. A family member cannot make the choice for you. A doctor cannot make it for you. A living will or a note written years earlier cannot make it for you either. Advance requests, where a person with a diagnosis like Alzheimer's asks in advance for MAID once their condition progresses, are not permitted under the federal Criminal Code. Quebec began accepting them under its own law on October 30, 2024, but the federal law has not changed to allow them.⁵

The catch is cruel in its own way. Audrey Parker, a Halifax woman with stage 4 breast cancer that had spread to her brain, was approved for MAID in 2018. She wanted to live through one more Christmas. But she feared the cancer would take her capacity before then, and that she would lose the right to the death she had chosen. So she died on November 1, 2018, earlier than she wanted to.⁶ Her public plea led to what is now called Audrey's Amendment: Since 2021, a person whose death is reasonably foreseeable, who has already been assessed and approved, and who is at risk of losing capacity can sign a written arrangement waiving final consent. Even then, if they show signs of refusal or resistance at the time, MAID cannot proceed.³

This is the opposite of the picture the "doctors are telling you to die" crowd paints. The law does not allow anyone to be put to death because a doctor, a relative or a government decided it was time. It allows a capable adult, who meets every condition, to choose for themselves, and it keeps giving them the chance to change their mind until the very end.

Counselling Suicide Is Still a Crime

The claim also gets the law backwards. Under section 241 of the Criminal Code, anyone who counsels a person to die by suicide, or abets them in doing so, commits an indictable offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. That remains the law today. The MAID exemption covers providing MAID in accordance with the law's criteria and safeguards. It does not permit anyone, doctor or otherwise, to persuade a patient to die.⁷

What the Criminal Code does say, in subsection 241(5.1), is this: "For greater certainty, no social worker, psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist, medical practitioner, nurse practitioner or other health care professional commits an offence if they provide information to a person on the lawful provision of medical assistance in dying."⁷ Informing is lawful. Persuading is a crime. A doctor who actually told a patient to kill themselves would be facing a prison sentence, not doing their job.

Why Doctors Bring It Up

Canadian doctors are bound by the principle of informed consent. A patient cannot make a free and informed decision about their care unless they know what their options are. That duty does not disappear when one of the options is uncomfortable to talk about.

The Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP), whose guidance many clinicians follow, puts it plainly. When a patient may be eligible, the conversation "must include the full range of available treatments, such as palliative care, comfort-focused measures, and, when appropriate MAiD." It adds: "Clinicians and other health-care professionals must not discuss MAiD with the intention of inducing, persuading, or convincing a patient to request it. The aim is to inform, not to influence." Clinicians are told to make clear that MAID "is one of several possible options, and that the clinician's role is to inform — not to recommend or promote — a particular course of action," and not to raise it at all when it is clearly inappropriate, such as with a patient who could not qualify.⁸

Doctors who object to MAID on moral or religious grounds do not have to provide it. But they cannot leave a patient in the dark. In Ontario, physicians who object must make an effective referral to a non-objecting colleague or agency, a requirement the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld in 2019.⁹ The principle is the same everywhere: The patient's right to know their options comes first.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Health Canada's most recent annual report covers 2024. That year, 16,499 people received MAID, about 5.1 per cent of all deaths in Canada, an increase of 6.9 per cent over 2023. The median age was 77.9. More than 95 per cent were people whose natural death was already reasonably foreseeable, and cancer was the most common underlying condition, at 63.6 per cent of those cases.¹⁰

The report also shows how many requests do not end in MAID. Of 22,535 requests, 4,017 people died of their illness first, 1,327 were found ineligible, and 692 withdrew. The most common reason for withdrawing was that the person had accepted other means of relieving their suffering. About 74 per cent of those who received MAID had received palliative care, and of the small share who needed it but had not received it, more than 91 per cent had access to it.¹⁰

And when people describe why they chose MAID, the overwhelming answer is not pressure from a doctor. It is the loss of the ability to take part in the activities that gave their life meaning, reported by 95 per cent of recipients, and the loss of independence, reported by roughly three in four.¹⁰

Where the Real Concerns Are

None of this means MAID is beyond criticism, and an honest account has to include the cases that fuel the fear.

In 2022, it emerged that a Veterans Affairs Canada case manager had raised MAID with veterans who had not asked about it. The department's investigation confirmed four cases, all involving the same employee, who no longer works there, and found no evidence of a wider pattern.¹¹ It was wrong, and it was treated as wrong. It was also a case worker, not a doctor, and it is precisely the kind of conduct that professional guidance and the Criminal Code prohibit.

Ontario's MAID Death Review Committee has raised harder questions. Its 2024 reviews found that people receiving MAID under Track 2 were more likely to come from the most marginalized parts of the population, with 48.3 per cent of Track 2 recipients in the fifth of Ontarians with the worst housing instability, compared with 34.3 per cent under Track 1, and it flagged individual cases involving social isolation, housing insecurity and inadequately treated mental illness.¹² Nationally, loneliness or isolation was cited by 44.7 per cent of Track 2 recipients.¹⁰ Whether people with a mental illness alone should ever qualify remains unresolved, and Parliament's own committee has recommended they should not.⁴

These are serious concerns, and they deserve serious answers. But the answer to a person choosing death because they are poor, isolated or unsupported is to fix the poverty, the isolation and the lack of support: Better housing, better disability benefits, better mental health care, better palliative care. It is not to stop doctors from telling patients the truth about their options.

Alberta's Dangerous Rollback

If the myth were only a myth, it would do limited harm. In Alberta, it is becoming law.

On March 18, 2026, Danielle Smith's government introduced Bill 18, the Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act. It passed third reading on April 22 and received royal assent on May 14.¹³ As of Dying With Dignity Canada's latest update, it had not yet been proclaimed into force, so the federal rules still apply in Alberta for now.¹⁴ Once it takes effect, it would make Alberta the first province to put its own statutory limits on MAID beyond the federal Criminal Code.¹⁵

Some of what the bill does already mirrors federal law: No MAID for anyone under 18, none for people whose only condition is a mental illness, and no advance requests.¹³ The Premier has framed it as protection, saying "MAID should not become a permanent response to a moment of crisis or despair."¹⁶ Nobody serious disagrees with that sentence. But the rest of the bill goes much further, and it is dangerous in ways that go to the heart of this article.

It gags doctors. The bill restricts regulated health professionals from providing information about MAID to their patients unless the patient raises it first, and restricts MAID information from being displayed in health-care facilities.¹³ That turns informed consent on its head. A patient cannot ask about an option they do not know exists. The doctor who knows every option is legally required to stay silent about one of them, and the patients most likely to be left in the dark are the ones with the least access to information: Those without a lawyer in the family, without Internet at their bedside, without the confidence to ask.

It collides with the catch-22. Because MAID requires capacity at the time it is provided, delay is not neutral. A patient with a brain tumour or a progressing neurological disease who learns about MAID weeks too late may lose the capacity to choose it at all. A law that forbids their doctor from telling them could cost them the choice permanently.

It closes the exits. Alberta physicians and nurse practitioners would be prohibited from referring patients for MAID assessments outside Alberta.¹³ Designated facilities may refuse to provide MAID on site and establish 150-metre exclusion zones around them.¹³

It rewrites who qualifies. The bill bans Track 2 MAID entirely and narrows "reasonably foreseeable" natural death to a prognosis of 12 months or less.¹³ Federal law sets no fixed timeline. Under Alberta's rule, a person with years of intolerable suffering from an incurable disease would be shut out. Kay Carter, whose family helped win the Carter case, had degenerative spinal stenosis, not a terminal illness.² The woman whose suffering helped establish the right to MAID in Canada would not qualify for it in Alberta.

It puts family in the room, whether the patient wants them or not. A family member must be present when MAID is provided, unless one is not reasonably available.¹³ For a patient estranged from an abusive parent, or whose family opposes their decision, the most private moment of their life becomes a matter of statute.

It invites a constitutional fight. In Carter, the Supreme Court tied the right to MAID to grievous and irremediable suffering, not to a terminal diagnosis, and in 2019 a Quebec court struck down the federal "reasonably foreseeable" requirement for the same reason.³ The Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Dying With Dignity Canada argue the bill violates the Charter, and legal experts expect a challenge.¹⁵ Alberta's government has said it would defend the law in court and has not ruled out using the notwithstanding clause to shield it.¹⁷

The debate over Track 2 and mental illness is a legitimate one, and it is happening where it should: In Parliament, in the courts, and in the medical profession. What Bill 18 adds is something different. It does not strengthen the safeguards that already require every alternative to be put before the patient. It removes the patient's right to hear about one of the options at all. A law built on the idea that doctors are pushing death ends up doing the opposite of protecting patients. It takes decisions away from capable adults and hands them to the government.

A Right Should Not Depend on Your Postal Code

Alberta's bill exposes a deeper problem. Today the right to MAID rests on the Supreme Court's reading of section 7 of the Charter in Carter, and on the federal Criminal Code, while each province runs its own health system and delivers MAID in its own way. That leaves room for a province to narrow what the Supreme Court recognized, and even to shield its law from the courts with the notwithstanding clause.

In my view, that is backwards. The right of a capable adult with a grievous and irremediable condition to choose MAID, and to be told it exists, should be written into the Charter as an explicit, amended right, not left to the politics of whichever province a person happens to be dying in. And it should come with a standardized federal mandate, the way health care already does.

Canada has done this before. The Canada Health Act sets five national principles that every province must meet to receive federal health funding: Public administration, comprehensiveness, universality, portability and accessibility. Each province decides how to organize and deliver care, but a Canadian does not lose their coverage by crossing a provincial border.¹⁸ MAID deserves the same treatment: The same eligibility criteria, the same safeguards, the same right to information, and the same access, from St. John's to Victoria, however each province chooses to deliver it. A ban on referring patients to another province is the opposite of portability.

This would not be easy. Amending the Constitution requires the House of Commons, the Senate, and at least seven provinces representing at least half of Canada's population.¹⁹ And to be secure, a new right would need to be written outside the reach of the notwithstanding clause, which can override the Charter's fundamental freedoms and its legal and equality rights in sections 2 and 7 to 15.²⁰ But hard is not the same as wrong. In the meantime, Parliament can set national standards for how MAID is delivered, just as it did for health care. A fundamental right should not end at the Alberta border.

Options, Not Orders

The people who say doctors are telling patients to commit suicide are describing a system that does not exist. The real one is built around the opposite idea: Nobody decides for you. MAID requires a capable adult who meets every condition, who has been told about every alternative, who has been assessed by two independent practitioners, and who can walk away at any moment, right up to the end.

A doctor who tells a dying patient about palliative care, pain management, counselling, home care and MAID is not steering that patient toward death. They are treating that patient as an adult with the right to know every option and to choose for themselves. That is not a failure of medicine. That is what informed consent looks like.