Canada has released its annual euthanasia report for 2022 — and it’s a bleak business. More than 13,000 Canadians received lethal jabs last year, representing 4.1 percent of all deaths in the country. From the Fourth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada 2022:
-
In 2022, there were 13,241 MAID provisions reported in Canada, accounting for 4.1% of all deaths in Canada.
-
The number of cases of MAID in 2022 represents a growth rate of 31.2% over 2021. All provinces except Manitoba and the Yukon continue to experience a steady year-over-year growth in 2022.
-
When all data sources are considered, the total number of medically assisted deaths reported in Canada since the introduction of federal MAID legislation in 2016 is 44,958.
There are more than 93,000 doctors in Canada. Most — thankfully — still do not lethally inject patients, with those who do killing about seven patients each. From the report:
-
The total number of unique practitioners providing MAID during 2022 was 1,837, up 19.1% from 1,542 in 2021. 95.0% of all MAID practitioners were physicians, while 5.0% were nurse practitioners.
-
Among physicians, family physicians conduct the majority of MAID provisions (67.7%), consistent with previous years results.
-
Nurse practitioners are providing an increasing share of MAID provisions. Physicians performed 90.6% of all MAID procedures during 2022, while nurse practitioners performed 9.4% of all MAID procedures, up from 8.4% in 2021 and from 7.0% in 2019.
-
In 2022, the average number of MAID provisions per practitioner was 7.2, compared to 6.5 (2021), 5.8 (2020) and 5.1 (2019).
The suffering that caused people to ask for death mostly involved existential despair:
In 2022, the most commonly cited sources of suffering by individuals requesting MAID were the loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities (86.3%), followed by loss of ability to perform activities of daily living (81.9%) and inadequate control of pain, or concern about controlling pain (59.2%).
A few thoughts:
First, Canada illustrates the consequences of embracing homicide as a “medical treatment.” Indeed, with the help of enthusiastic media boosting, Canada is quickly normalizing the lethal jab as a means of death, even teaching children about the practice and at least in one case, euthanasia being offered to a veteran with PTSD. There have now even been cases of spouses being euthanized together (as also happens in Belgium and Netherlands) as well as euthanasia being suggested to people with disabilities. One elderly woman asked to be killed because she was so anguished at undergoing a second Covid lockdown. Ironically, her family was allowed to be present for her death but would not have been allowed to visit in person had she gone on living.
Second, it is worth noting that these suicidal people generally do not receive prevention interventions. But they are often asked for their organs — particularly in Ontario — with the pressure on for that utilitarian procedure to be expanded throughout the country.
Third, perhaps because physician participation in euthanasia is, shall we say, not robust, doctors are being pressured by the medical and bioethics establishments to participate in euthanasia. Indeed, in Ontario, refusing to kill qualified patients or refer to a doctor who will can subject the refusing M.D. to medical discipline.
Medicalized killing in Canada is no longer restricted to people whose deaths are “reasonably foreseeable” but now includes people with disabilities, the chronically ill, the frail elderly, and ill people who want to die because of loneliness — to be supplemented next year by the mentally ill. That means the number of kills — and organ harvests — will almost surely continue to increase exponentially among our closest cultural cousins to the north.
If the same percentage of people were killed by doctors in the USA as are in Canada, that would amount to about 140,000 homicides annually. That’s about as many people as live in cities such as Waco, Texas, or Fullerton, Calif.
We in the United States should pay close attention to what is happening in Canada. And we should ask ourselves: Is this the kind of medical milieu we want for the care of medically vulnerable people? If yes, we will continue to push for legalizing assisted suicide, which will eventually become lethal-injection euthanasia as resistance here decreases. If not, we can learn the lesson and refuse any further incursions of the culture of death.