QUEBEC CITY, Quebec (LifeSiteNews) — The province of Quebec has the highest euthanasia rate in the world.
On October 30, the Quebec 2024–2025 Report of the Commission on End-of-Life Care revealed that deaths by Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) have reached 7.4 percent of the total provincial deaths and have increased 9% since last year.
“The Commission notes that MAiD is in increasing demand and occupies an important place in the public sphere in Quebec,” the report asserts.
“The Commission rigorously and vigilantly fulfills its mandate to ensure that MAiD requirements are properly applied in Quebec and that MAiD is not chosen as a treatment option when other [sic] curative, palliative, or end-of-life care options are unavailable,” it continued.
Despite its promise, the commission reported that 50 percent of the MAiD requests were from those who felt they were a burden to family, friends, or caregivers. Twenty-four percent of those killed cited loneliness and isolation as reasons to end their lives.
Additionally, the report found an alarmingly short period of time between MAiD requests and doctors administering the lethal drugs. According to the report, 4 percent of requests for MAiD were fulfilled on the same or next day.
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The commission itself admitted that “there are no management indicators or standardized tools for assessing the quality of palliative and end-of-life care services, how well they meet the needs of patients and families, or how efficiently the system operates. The Commission therefore cannot determine whether the needs of people who could benefit from such care are being met.”
“We cannot continue to navigate blindly on such a critical issue,” it continued. However, the report failed to call for an end to the lethal practice.
According to Dr. David Lussier, a geriatrician at the Montreal University Institute of Geriatrics, Quebec has the highest number of requests for assisted suicide in Canada and worldwide. Since 2022, the French-speaking province has been trailed by the Netherlands and Belgium in such deaths.
Quebec is also at the forefront of the push to expand the practice. As LifeSiteNews previously reported, the province’s newest palliative care home prides itself on offering assisted suicide to its most vulnerable patients.
In 2024, the province announced that it plans to go ahead with taking euthanasia requests in advance, despite the practice being illegal at the federal level.
Assisted suicide is on the rise not only in Quebec but throughout Canada as well. Since legalizing the deadly practice at the federal level in 2016, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has continued to expanded who can qualify for death. In 2021, the Trudeau government passed a bill that permitted the killing of those who are not terminally ill but who suffer solely from chronic disease.
The government has also attempted to expand the practice to those suffering solely from mental illness but has delayed until 2027 after pushback from pro-life, medical, and mental health groups as well as most of Canada’s provinces.
READ: Display of empty wheelchairs symbolizes disability community’s opposition to euthanasia
Overall, the number of Canadians killed by lethal injection since 2016 stands at close to 65,000, with an estimated 16,000 deaths in 2023 alone. Many fear that because the official statistics are manipulated the number may be even higher.
