Month: January 2025

Your great and good National Post published an important story on assisted suicide on Thursday, chronicling a startling change in policy by the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. The left-libertarian BCCLA was the most important institutional force behind the litigation efforts that led to euthanasia legalization in Canada (under the rancid euphemistic cover of “medical assistance in dying,” or “MAiD”). Up until recently, every member and contributor of that group would have unquestionably cited legal suicide as its single most impressive accomplishment, its firmest and proudest stamp on Canadian history. Now … not so much.

Earlier this month, the federal government’s annual report on MAiD for calendar 2023 was released, and it confirmed some of these concerns. Ninety-six per cent of MAiD recipients come from what the law calls “Track 1” of the long black train; they have a terminal illness and their death is “reasonably foreseeable” without being hastened at state expense. Among these people, 14,721 of whom were MAiDed, 45 per cent cited being a “perceived burden on family, friends or caregivers” as one motive for seeking assisted suicide.

Among the smaller group on Track 2 — 622 people who were suffering intolerably but not terminally ill — this figure was similar, but 47 per cent also cited “isolation or loneliness” as a motive. That figure was only 21 per cent, which might still be high enough to induce nervousness, in the large Track 1 group.