Published June 26, 2025
A spectre is haunting the global debate on euthanasia: Canada. On the same day that the New York State Legislature voted to pass the “Medical Aid in Dying Act” earlier this month, the American Medical Association reaffirmed for the sixth time its position that physicians ending the life of their patients is “fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as a healer” and criticized the use of the term “aid in dying” as “unacceptable” in its implicit replacement of palliative care.
But New York legislators weren’t looking at the American Medical Association, or even the 11 states where the practice is legal in the U.S. They were looking instead at Canada: the first country to coin the term “Medical Assistance in Dying,” replacing the more accurate clinic terms of “physician-assisted suicide” or “euthanasia,” depending on whether physicians only prescribe or administer lethal medications. It also wasn’t the only Canadian contribution to the bill: the New York legislation is the first legislation in the U.S. that does not include any waiting period between assessment and death from physician-assisted suicide, a safeguard that Canada already removed in 2021.
No other Canadian public policy has ever been as influential as MAID. For both supporters and critics of euthanasia, Canada remains both a model and the most dangerous canary in the coal mine. The editorials of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post criticized the New York legislation as setting a path to Canadian-style MAID. Even at the start of an election year last January, both Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth and Republican Senator Marco Rubio explicitly condemned Canada’s MAID program.
The backlash to Canada’s MAID program is so intense that supporters of assisted suicide globally have begun to backtrack. Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, whose bill to legalize assisted suicide in the United Kingdom narrowly passed its final reading in the House of Commons last week, fought off repeated claims by critics that she is bringing Canada’s MAID program to the U.K.: “I’m not looking at the model that is going on in Canada.” But other organizations continue to look at Canada. In March, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities explicitly rebuked Canada’s MAID program as running in contravention of the “right to life for persons with disabilities” and strongly urged Canada to stop euthanizing persons with disabilities on the basis of non-terminal disabilities alone.
The response by Patty Hajdu, the minister of jobs and families? To state to the committee that Canada is working to “build a country free from barriers, where no one is left behind.”
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Author: brianpeckford
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