Ben Woodfinden: The euthanize-the-mentally-ill crowd wants to override democracy

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And this is exactly the sort of question where elected officials and expert witnesses and testimony should be used to make decisions, and in this case gives every reason for caution. In 2022, the veterans affairs minister admitted that one of the department’s caseworkers had offered assisted death to at least four veterans who had come for help. Christine Gauthier, a retired corporal and Paralympian, testified that she had been offered it while spending five years trying to get a wheelchair ramp. The minister called the conduct disgusting. More veterans came forward. 

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Normand Meunier, a quadriplegic Quebec man, went into a Saint-Jérôme emergency room with a respiratory virus in January 2024 and lay four days on a stretcher with no pressure mattress, though he had asked for one. He came out with a bedsore that opened to the bone, was told it would take months to heal at best, and chose an assisted death rather than live inside that wound. A coroner’s inquiry has since examined how a hospital did that to him, and his widow is pursuing a lawsuit. 

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The anecdotes are brutal. The data is worse. Ontario’s Office of the Chief Coroner, reviewing Track 2 deaths, found the people dying under the looser stream are worse housed and more vulnerable than the population at large: those in the most housing-unstable fifth of the province made up nearly half of all Track 2 recipients, and those in the poorest fifth were over-represented. The reviewers documented people approved for death amid untreated mental illness, addictions, and inadequate housing. With its 90-day waits and two assessors, the system still fails to keep the vulnerable out, and for too many it has become the path of least resistance, the thing the state offers after failing them everywhere else. 

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Canada’s disability community has been raising this alarm for years. In March 2025, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recommended that Canada repeal Track 2 altogether. Krista Carr, of Inclusion Canada, put it plainly: “We are offering people with disabilities MAID instead of help.”

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As for the countries that have “figured this out,” some of their own doctors came to warn this committee. Jim van Os, a senior Dutch psychiatrist, told members the Dutch experience “offers a warning for Canada.” Psychiatric euthanasia in the Netherlands has climbed from two cases in 2011 to 219 in 2024; the number of young people receiving it has grown about 500 per cent in five years; and by van Os’s own arithmetic, of every ten young people who receive psychiatric euthanasia, only one would otherwise have died by suicide. The other nine would have lived. That is the model we are told has solved this.

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The committee is the best answer to its own critics. Its recommendation against permitting MAID for mental health reasons was supported by Liberal and Conservative members alike, the two parties that between them took more than 85 per cent of the vote in last year’s election; the dissents came from four appointed senators and the Bloc. Reasonable, decent Canadians look at the same evidence and land in different places, in good faith. Democracy exists for exactly that situation. We disagree, we still have to decide together, and the deciding belongs to the people who must answer to us for it. On Friday Mark Carney called it “a government decision” rather than a personal one. The Globe has reported that his government is prepared to legislate the exclusion rather than send it to the court.

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A reference to the Supreme Court would not make that disagreement disappear. It would only move it into a smaller room, the one with nine people in it. The judges disagree too, and they settle it the way the committee did, by counting heads, except that five heads among nine can overrule a national Parliament. Picard’s praise of judges who “make reasoned decisions,” unlike politicians, is not a throwaway. It is the whole worldview in a sentence: that the robed lawyers are the better moral reasoners, philosopher kings and queens fit to tell a free people whose suffering qualifies them for death. They have never claimed to be that. They are lawyers, good ones, asked to settle by majority vote a question the country is meant to settle for itself. 

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The committee did its job. You are free to think it did the job badly, to say so, and to vote for someone who will undo it. What you do not get to do, having lost the argument, is appeal democracy to a higher court. 

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National Post

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