Canada Reconsiders Allowing Assisted Suicide for the Mentally Ill

On June 17, 2016, Canada became one of the few countries in the world to legalize medical assistance in dying. On the law’s 10th anniversary this week, a special parliamentary committee submitted a report with a single recommendation: It proposed not a pause, nor a delay, but rather a permanent door closing — that the federal government amend the Criminal Code to “indefinitely exclude” people whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness from MAID eligibility.In the decade since the law passed, 76,475 Canadians have died with medical assistance. Last year alone, that number reached 16,499 — a 6.9 percent increase from the year before. Quebec now holds the highest medically assisted death rate in the world, with assisted dying accounting for a record 7.9 percent of all deaths in the province in 2024–2025. Across Canada, the figure stands at 5.1 percent.So how did one of the world’s most expansive assisted dying programs get here, and does anyone actually know what it has become?“Overall, Canada’s MAID law and practice is problematically focused on providing access to MAID, not on protecting against premature death,” a professor of health law and policy at the University of Toronto, Trudo Lemmens, tells The New York Sun.In other words, the program perhaps grew faster than anyone’s ability, or willingness, to ask whether it should.Parliament blinks — againThe committee’s 88-page report reviews whether Canada is ready from a clinical, health systems, and regulatory perspective to expand its assisted suicide law to cover persons whose only underlying medical condition is a mental illness. Current law provides for the expansion to take effect in March of next year.Justice Minister Sean Fraser has said he will take the next few weeks to review the committee’s findings before responding but would not commit to a timeline. His response is expected by July 11.If the government wants to pause the expansion indefinitely, it will have to introduce legislation, and to avoid court challenges, could potentially invoke what is known as the “notwithstanding clause” for the first time in federal history. The clause allows certain constitutional protections to be overridden in specific circumstances.A dissenting opinion from senators Dr. Rosemary Moodie, Pamela Wallin, and Kristopher Wells — all committee members — said the panel undertook a “highly irregular and flawed process,” noting that of the 44 witnesses called to testify, more than two-thirds had been publicly opposed to the expansion of MAID for mental illness. The Bloc Québécois, a Quebec-based political party, alsodissented, with a member of Parliament, Luc Thériault, calling the exercise “undoubtedly the worst exercise I’ve been a part of.”A Canadian Armed Forces veteran and anti-MAID advocate, Kelsi Sheren, underscores that the committee’s recommendation should not be mistaken for action.“It’s a recommendation, not a law, not a policy, not an enforceable decision,” she tells the Sun. “The government hasn’t acted on it. That distinction matters enormously because until Parliament moves, nothing has actually changed.”Even if Parliament does act, she says, any legislation could be overridden by a court ruling in the pending case of Claire Brosseau, a woman who has suffered for decades from severe mental illness and is seeking approval from the courts for access to MAID.Mr. Lemmens maintains that the committee’s recommendation does mark something new, however limited.“It is meaningful because it is the first time that a parliamentary committee has explicitly recommended to indefinitely pause further expansion, acknowledging that allowing physicians to end the life of people as a way to address their mental illness is problematic,” he says.The debate over the committee’s process has become nearly as contentious as the policy itself. Of the 44 witnesses called, more than two-thirds were on record opposing the mental illness expansion before they ever testified, a composition critics say predetermined the outcome. With court challenges already filed and the government’s response still weeks away, the question of what actually changes may belong more to the judiciary than to Parliament.What is not in dispute is what the program has already done, and who it has already reached.A system without a safety netAlan Nichols was 61 years old when he died on July 26, 2019. He was not terminally ill. He used a cochlear implant to help him hear. The medical reason listed on his MAID application was hearing loss. He had a documented history of mental illness and had been involuntarily hospitalized for his mental health for a month before his death.His family has spent years seeking answers. His sister-in-law, Trish Nichols, said she still feels sick whenever a relative is admitted to the hospital. His brother, Gary, said, “There is no accountability.”In parliamentary testimony, Ms. Nichols wrote: “On Alan’s MAID form, hearing loss was stated as the reason for application. How can doctors accept, approve and administer a death for this when Alan did not have a terminal illness and his hearing had been corrected and all the while he had been involuntarily admitted for suicide protection?” No investigation was ever opened. No practitioner was disciplined.Mr. Lemmens tells the Sun that the system that allowed Nichols to die without scrutiny remains largely intact.“Both official reports and media reports document problematic cases, including those of persons with suicidal ideation fast-tracked to death by some MAID providers who interpret the law overly flexibly, do not always explore other options, and sometimes fail to engage in serious capacity and informed consent assessments,” he says.Mr. Lemmens served on an Ontario chief coroner’s MAID Death Review Committee that documented what he describes as “sloppy capacity and informed consent procedures,” deaths involving people with unaddressed mental health problems, suicidality, addiction, and cases where socioeconomic factors appeared to be driving requests to die.The Chief Coroner’s Office forwarded several cases to provincial professional regulatory colleges — which, Mr. Lemmens notes, failed to conduct disciplinary proceedings. No case has been referred for criminal investigation, even though violations of MAID criteria constitute criminal offenses.In Ontario, the picture grew murkier. The Globe and Mail found the province had quietly remade its MAID Death Review Committee — making it smaller, less independent and with a mandate that critics say now serves largely to validate the system it once existed to scrutinize. They called it a “regulatory Potemkin village.”The numbers nobody is countingThe oversight debate runs deeper than case-by-case failures. Ms. Sheren, who testified on the issue before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs, emphasizes that the data Canada publishes about MAID deaths is, by design, incomplete.“Because MAID is not considered a cause of death by the World Health Organization, if someone with cancer chooses MAID, the cause of death recorded on their certificate is cancer, not MAID,” Ms. Sheren tells the Sun. “The federal guidelines governing what goes on death certificates are non-binding, and death reporting is the responsibility of individual provinces and territories. That means the numbers Canada publishes aren’t just incomplete — the system itself obscures them.”In March 2025, the United Nations called on Canada to pull back Track 2, which covers those whose deaths are not reasonably foreseeable, and to shelve the mental illness expansion entirely. For close to 10 months after that, the Canadian government said nothing.Mr. Lemmens points out that only one province has substantively engaged with that international pressure.“The federal government and provincial governments have in the past ignored the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities critique,” he says. “The only province that has enacted specific legislation appearing to respond to the committee’s critique is Alberta.”Not everyone accepts that perspective. The chief executive officer of Dying With Dignity Canada, Helen Long, contends that the oversight critics are missing a larger point.“MAID is legislated under the criminal code and is the most overseen, monitored and reported medical intervention in Canada,” she tells the Sun. “There is mandatory reporting to the federal government of all MAID requests and provisions.”Her organization has already filed a constitutional challenge, arguing that excluding people with mental illness while permitting those with co-occurring physical ailments to be assessed violates the equal protection guarantees in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, part of its constitution.Ms. Long points to the law’s origins as further grounds for expanding MAID.“MAID legislation was passed a year after the 2015 landmark Supreme Court ruling in Carter v. Canada that stated that a ban on medical assistance in dying violated the charter rights of people in Canada,” she continues. “A decade later, 85 percent of people in Canada support this ruling.”On the question of Quebec’s record death rate, she argues that the numbers reflect awareness, not dysfunction.“Rising MAID numbers do not indicate a problem; it shows more people are aware of MAID as an end-of-life option,” Ms. Long says. “People who are found eligible and choose MAID want control at the end of their life and are avoiding unwanted suffering.”A June 2026 Angus Reid poll found that 77 percent of Canadians continue to support the original 2016 MAID criteria. However, 56 percent did not know, before completing the survey, that an expansion to mental illness was already scheduled. That gap between what Canadians believe the law allows and what it is poised to permit may be the most consequential finding of all.Ms. Sheren cautions against assuming the committee’s recommendation settles anything.“We’ve seen this before; the courts drove MAID expansion in the first place,” she says. “The legislature follows the judiciary in Canada, not the other way around. So calling this a meaningful shift assumes the government responds, responds correctly, and the courts don’t intervene. That’s three assumptions I’m not willing to make.”

Canada Reconsiders Allowing Assisted Suicide for the Mentally Ill

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