By Wendy McElroy at Brownstone dot org.

On February 5, 2026, in the Canadian Parliament, Conservative MP Garnett Genuis tabled Bill C-260, which prohibits civil servants or others with authority from recommending assisted-suicide to anyone who has not asked about it.

Genuis cited "examples such as Canadian Armed Forces veteran David Baltzer…who was offered MAiD by Veterans Affairs Canada, as well as Nicholas Bergeron, a 46-year-old man from Quebec who was not interested in a medically facilitated death, but was 'repeatedly' pushed towards the option by a social worker."

I can verify this government policy personally since a family member was encouraged without prompting to attend a seminar on how and why to kill himself.

Introduced in 2016, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) is a federal program that can differ slightly from province to province. The core and constant concept: at the request of an eligible individual, the government administers death either by euthanasia through a lethal injection delivered by a clinician or by assisted suicide through self-administered medication that is facilitated by a clinician. An estimated 99% of MAiD cases involve euthanasia, not assisted suicide.

For one thing, the populous province of Quebec prohibits self-administration; in other provinces, health regions and care facilities perform only euthanasia or lean strongly in this direction. Perhaps government chose the acronym MAiD because Medical Euthanasia sounds jarring.

MAiD sets the extremely dangerous precedent of granting government the authority to kill an innocent person. The standard rebuttal to this argument is that the innocent person must request the "service" of suicide.

MAiD is not a uniquely Canadian issue. State-assisted suicide has spread quickly across the Western world. Currently (February 2026), over a dozen American states have legalized it in some form. In the UK, the Terminally Ill Adults Bill is at the Committee Stage in Parliament where it reportedly has 1,227 proposed amendments.

Some regions in Australia are also drawing up programs. The list of nations offering State-assisted suicide or euthanasia scrolls on and on, including Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, Austria, New Zealand…The same concerns and debates surrounding MAiD bear directly on these other programs, especially as MAiD is often referenced as a model or as a cautionary tale.

I view MAiD as a cautionary tale.

Medical personnel may have religious or other ethical objections to administering MAiD. Perhaps they view euthanasia as a violation of the Hippocratic Oath, which states, "First, Do No Harm." For many, these 4 words form the backbone of medical ethics. Canada does not force doctors or nurse practitioners to administer MAiD, but the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP) explains that "holding a conscientious objection to MAiD does not negate these obligations.

Rather, it activates alternative duties to discuss the objection with the patient and to refer or transfer the care of the patient to a non-objecting clinician or other effective information-providing and access-facilitating resource." This forces the practitioners to participate in the MAiD system to which they may strenuously object. Equally, some taxpayers may consider MAiD to be a form of murder that is covered by tax-funded health care. They may be as repulsed by having to pay for MAiD as much as many pro-life advocates detest having to finance abortions.

All assisted-suicide nations will confront certain practical questions; for example, all programs need to answer "what constitutes consent, and how is it documented?"

A sketch of how these general practical problems surfaced in Canada gives insight.

The original 2016 legislation (Bill C-14) provided safeguards to ensure applicants were eligible for MAiD. An amendment in 2021 (Bill C-7) established a two-track system of qualifications: Track 1 and Track 2. What is now called T...