These people are dying to leave Canada.
Canada’s medically assisted suicide is responsible for nearly one in 10 deaths in some part of the country — with one area seeing rates over 13%.
Lanaudière — a mountainous region of Quebec just north of Montreal — had 13.4% of its deaths come from Canada’s medical assistance in dying program (MAID) in 2025, official records showed.
Across French-speaking Quebec, which is Canada’s second most populous province, 6,268 died by assisted suicide that year.
Nearly 8% of all deaths across the province of 8.5 million people were by assisted suicide, according to the health department data.
And it’s not just Quebec where the numbers are high and rising — across Canada in British Columbia more than 7% of deaths that year were through MAID, accounting for 3,189 out of 44,000 deaths in 12 months.
Nationwide, about 1 in 20 deaths were from assisted suicide. Numbers from 2025 are expected to be released soon, but the latest figures show 76,475 people have died by assisted suicide between 2016 when MAID was enacted and 2024.
The median age of assisted suicide patients was about 78 in 2024.
And experts have predicted the total MAID deaths have likely already passed the 100,000 mark as the controversial law turned 10 back in June — even though the official reports may not finalize that grim total for another year or two.
Canada has a population of 42 million and, like most developed economies, birthrates are plunging and the average age is rising.
With the nation’s universal health system, that means the wait times for specialized care has been increasing. The average wait to be treated by a specialist doctor was 28.6 weeks in 2025 — more than half a year, according to the Fraser Institute.
For orthopedic surgery it was 48 weeks, a month short of a full year. In the US the average wait time is 12 days.
“What was introduced as an exceptional measure is now a normalized part of clinical care,” Dr. Ramona Coelho of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute cautioned in March as the 10-year anniversary approached.
“That number marks a quiet but profound transformation in how medicine understands suffering, autonomy and its own purpose,” she added.
Coelho’s fears highlight the core of MAID’s controversy — that introducing the option of assisted suicide could slowly erode the medical world’s fundamental goal of healing, and instead normalize letting patients slip away who may otherwise have had a chance.
“Assisted dying is often framed as compassion for the suffering and preservation of a patient’s autonomy,” Coelho wrote. “But what happens when assisted dying becomes embedded in clinical decision-making and clinicians shift from focusing on healing to evaluating whether suffering justifies death?”
Proponents disagree, arguing people should be allowed to end suffering if they want and that the measure is akin to ceasing medical care in a hospice program.
But at its most extreme level, critics have feared people who are incapable of making decisions for themselves could be effectively executed through the law.
A handful of such cases have reportedly occurred. In July, 83-year-old grandma Brigitte Stegemann died through MAID after a stomach cancer battle, only to tell her granddaughter days before the procedure that she had no memory of putting in the request and saying “I’ve made a mistake,” the Daily Mail reported.
And in December of 2025, 26-year-old Kiano Vafaeian died by assisted suicide after submitting a claim based on diabetes, vision problems and depression — but his family later insisted he was in no condition to make such a decision himself, and that he was approved for MAID the same day he applied.
The vast majority of MAID deaths, however, have not followed such a gruesome playbook.
In 2024 more than 95% of patients were deemed “Track 1,” meaning their deaths were “reasonably foreseeable.”
And not everybody who applies for MAID in Canada are approved — of the 22,535 who applied in 2024, 16,499 were approved and died by assisted suicide.
One major difference between the Canadian MAID system and US assisted suicide laws — including the one that started in New York in August — is that Canadian doctors are the ones administering the lethal drugs.
Under assisted suicide laws in Oregon, California and other states, doctors may only proscribe the drugs; the patient must drink them to die.
