Death by doctor-assisted lethal injection, under the title Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), now accounts for over 5 percent of all deaths in Canada.
In November, Health Canada published the Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying, which tracked the expansion of euthanasia in 2024, with 16,499 Canadians receiving MAiD, amounting to 5.1 percent of the total deaths in Canada.
“The Government of Canada will continue its work to help ensure that the legislation on MAiD reflects the needs of people in Canada, protects those who may be vulnerable, and supports autonomy and freedom of choice,” the report asserts.
Health Canada noted that MAiD is not considered a cause of death by the World Health Organization and, therefore, “the number of MAiD provisions should not be compared to cause of death statistics in Canada in order to determine the prevalence (the proportion of all decedents) nor to rank MAiD as a cause of death.”
However, the government agency did admit that 16,499 people received MAiD in 2024, which amounted to 5.1 percent of “people in Canada who died.”
The report noted that that was “a small (0.4%) increase from 2023,” adding that “this percentage may change with final counts of deaths in Canada from Statistics Canada.”
Notably, the year-over-year increase was 6.9 percent, a significant slowdown from prior years, such as the 36.8 percent increase from 2019–2020. Health Canada suggested that MAiD provisions are beginning to “stabilize,” though long-term trends require more years of data.
According to the data, 95.6 percent of the deaths were Track 1, meaning those whose death was foreseeable, compared to only 4.4 percent being Track 2 requests, which end the lives of those who are not terminally ill but have lost the will to live due to their having chronic health problems.
“Although Track 2 provisions represented 4.4% of MAiD cases in 2024, they represented close to a quarter (24.2%) of all MAiD requests that were assessed as ineligible,” the report stated.
At the same time, internal documents from Ontario doctors in 2024 that revealed Canadians are choosing euthanasia because of poverty and loneliness, not as a result of an alleged terminal illness.
Hellbound and Down 