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Next year, Canada plans on expanding medical suicide to those whose death isn’t in the foreseeable future
Published Mar 18, 2026 • 2 minute read
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Centre Block on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Sunday, May 25, 2025. Photo by Bryan Passifiume /Toronto SunArticle content
OTTAWA — With Canada set to expand its medical assistance in dying (MAID) regime to include mental illness as a sole condition, advocacy groups for disabled Canadians are sounding the alarm.
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In 2021, Canada removed the requirement that death had to be “reasonably foreseeable” to qualify for MAID.
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Canada plans to expand eligibility criteria on March 17, 2027, to what the current framework refers to as “track two” — individuals seeking to commit medical suicide whose death is not a reasonable outcome in the foreseeable future.
Violates rights of the disabled: Report
Currently, only patients under “track one” of the framework are eligible for MAID — those suffering from a terminal illness or whose natural death is approaching.
That’s a concern for Inclusion Canada CEO Krista Carr, who told the Toronto Sun that incorporating track two patients into the framework poses a danger to the disabled.
“When (Canadians) think about medical assistance in dying, they think about their friend who has stage four cancer and suffering intolerably, and wants to control the timing of an already imminent death,” she said.
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“Track two is very different than that — and so we believe, and the United Nations agrees with us, that track two means a violation of the rights of persons with disabilities.”
Indeed, a report authored last March by the United Nations’ Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities urged Canada to reverse course on track two, concerned that legislation that equates significant disability with eligibility for therapeutic suicide violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
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Little nation-wide oversight of MAID
Although MAID isn’t included by Statistics Canada’s annual list of common causes of death, the government’s own numbers indicate that 16,499 Canadians died via MAID in 2024.
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That made MAiD the year’s fourth most common cause of death, ranking between accidents (20,260) and strokes (13,725.)
“When you look at track 2 MAID, you’ll see disproportionately women, disproportionately people that live in low socioeconomic circumstances, over 50% reported feeling like they were a burden to their family, it just goes on and on,” Carr said.
“We were told that we were fear mongering, that this would never happen, and our medical system is more sophisticated than that and we’ve got safeguards — that’s simply untrue, there’s no oversight for any of it.”
While Ontario’s office of the chief coroner established a MAID Death Review Committee (MDRC) two years ago, that isn’t the case Canada-wide — not to mention cases of Ontarians doctor-shopping out-of-province after being denied therapeutic suicide in this province.
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Carr recalls the 2022 case of a Toronto woman named Sophie who opted for medically-supervised death after being unable to find affordable housing to accommodate her disability — a case Karr says indicates Canada’s well past the slippery slope.
“This is going to make living life with a disability so more more stigmatized, because now we actually have a characteristic which is grounds by which to terminate life,” she said.
“We have an advocate in our movement who will often say that track one MAID is to escape a painful death, while track two is made to escape a painful life. “And I don’t think that’s the kind of country Canada prides itself on being.”
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