Canada’s suicide service is coming to Britain

If you want to glimpse Britain’s potential dark future, look west to Canada.

In 2016, Canada legalised Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) for the terminally ill. MAID was sold as a state-controlled solution to suffering, and came with all the usual reassurances that it was intended only for the dying, the desperate, and those with few other alternatives. Ten years on, it’s a machine for death.

Now, people with chronic illness, disability or even depression can be legally euthanised via MAID. Soon, those with any mental illness will qualify. Minors could be next. If any ‘safeguards’ existed, they have long since dissolved.

If Keir Starmer’s government gets its way, Britain could be in line for its own ill-defined, industrial-scale assisted-suicide policy. After all, Canada’s campaigners started from a suspiciously similar place to their UK counterparts, who insist that assisted suicide is about empathy and agency. Look where things ended up.

In 2022, 13,241 Canadians died through MAID. That’s 4.1 per cent of all annual deaths. The UK equivalent would be around 30,000 deaths a year. A third of Canadians who sought MAID cited ‘being a burden’ among their reasons for wanting to die. If we follow Canada’s lead, there is a danger that vulnerable and elderly people, as well as those with disabilities, will feel obliged to consider assisted suicide so as to relieve pressure on their loved ones. This is not so much a clear-headed ‘choice’ as an escape hatch from shame.

One recent case says it all. Kiano Vafaeian, a 26-year-old blind man, sought euthanasia while suffering from what his family described as ‘seasonal depression’. After being rejected by several doctors, Vafaeian turned to Dr Ellen Wiebe, a notoriously prolific practitioner of MAID who claims to have helped over 500 patients die. Wiebe allegedly ‘coached’ him on how to qualify as a ‘Track Two’ patient – that is, the programme for patients whose natural death isn’t deemed ‘reasonably imminent’. News of Vafaeian’s death only reached his parents days later. Apparently, the system couldn’t give him the support he needed to get through his depression, but it could give him a lethal injection. A policy sold as ‘compassionate’ resulted in a young man ending his life at 26, with the help of the state.

Canada is still sliding down the slippery slope. In 2021, the requirement that death be ‘reasonably foreseeable’ for candidates to qualify for MAID was quietly dropped. From March next year, those suffering solely from mental-health problems will be eligible. The government is already consulting on whether it should include ‘mature minors’ and babies as possible candidates for euthanasia.

Tellingly, a 2017 study in Canada’s leading medical journal proudly highlighted that premature deaths from MAID could save as much as $138.8million annually in healthcare spending alone. It is difficult to imagine a more dystopian venture than calculating the cost efficiency of euthanising citizens.

Even more concerning is the turnaround in public attitudes to MAID. A 2023 poll found that 27 per cent of Canadians support assisted dying for people in poverty, and 28 per cent for those who are homeless.

Britain is by no means immune to this. The Dignity in Dying campaign – alongside MP Kim Leadbeater and Labour peer Charlie Falconer, who are sponsoring the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill – is pushing for assisted suicide to be forced through parliament, without the usual scrutiny. Falconer is even willing to resort to the Parliament Acts to ensure the bill bypasses the House of Lords – a mechanism that has never before been used for a Private Member’s Bill. Centuries of legal protections could soon be wiped away.

For now, the British public is not sold. Polling shows that support for assisted dying plummets when people learn how far the policy would really go. Initially, many assume it’s about easing the final hours of pain. It’s not. It’s about giving the state power to facilitate death long before it would have naturally occurred.

Canada is currently living through that reality. A Veterans Affairs Canada caseworker was found to have offered MAID to veterans seeking help for PTSD, instead of the therapy they need. The veterans department even advised Christine Gauthier, retired corporal and former Paralympian, to consider ending her life when she requested a wheelchair ramp for her home. Clearly, MAID does not offer ‘autonomy’ in the way our well-off, comfortable and able-bodied politicians would have us believe.

Already in Britain, it has become acceptable to suggest that some lives aren’t worth living. In 2024, columnist Matthew Parris predicted that ‘“Your time is up”… may one day be the kind of unspoken hint that everybody understands. And that’s a good thing.’ Hinting that people would be better off dead than living with a disability, being old, or simply being costly – that’s the endpoint of legalising euthanasia and pretending it’s about choice. Really, it’s about making the choice to stay alive that little bit more difficult.

For some, supporting assisted suicide really does come from a place of compassion. But as far as the state is concerned, it’s about control. In Canada, it’s about tidying away the inconvenient, the lonely, the dependent, the no-longer-productive. Assisted suicide gives this a legal, antiseptic gloss. It swaps social solidarity for the syringe.

It could happen in Britain. It takes just one slick campaign, one emotional appeal, or a government bent on forcing a moral revolution through parliament by deceit. But once we cross that line, it will be near impossible to backtrack.

If Keir Starmer really wants to ‘modernise’ Britain’s laws on assisted suicide, perhaps he should start by learning from other nations’ mistakes. If we start ‘assisting’ people to die, it won’t be long before we forget how to help them live.

Fleur Elizabeth Meston is a writer and activist based in London.