Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Canada legalized assisted dying in 2016, with a promise that it would be “narrow, cautious,” and reserved for those within months of death. It hasn’t stayed that way. The law has since expanded to cover people with chronic but nonterminal conditions, people with disabilities, and people whose suffering is entirely psychological. Now a parliamentary committee is studying whether to extend it further, to people with mental illness as their sole underlying condition.
Rupa Subramanya has been reporting on this for The Free Press for years. She’s interviewed patients in the weeks before their deaths, the doctors who perform the procedures, and the families left behind. Some of those doctors, she found, actively seek out the limits of what the law allows and then push past them.
I’m not coming into this one cold. I’ve written about MAID before, and I lost my mother to stage 4 cancer, so I know what it looks like when assisted dying feels like a merciful choice. Rupa and I agree on that core concept: We both support the right to die for the genuinely terminally ill, and we’re both troubled by where Canada has gone. We also get into the harder questions: where the line should be, whether the slippery slope is real or whether places like Oregon show that states or countries can keep a narrow law intact, and what Canada’s expansion reveals about the values and perhaps the pathologies of modern Western society.
Canada legalized assisted dying in 2016, with a promise that it would be “narrow, cautious,” and reserved for those within months of death. It hasn’t stayed that way. The law has since expanded to cover people with chronic but nonterminal conditions, people with disabilities, and people whose suffering is entirely psychological. Now a parliamentary committee is studying whether to extend it further, to people with mental illness as their sole underlying condition.
Rupa Subramanya has been reporting on this for The Free Press for years. She’s interviewed patients in the weeks before their deaths, the doctors who perform the procedures, and the families left behind. Some of those doctors, she found, actively seek out the limits of what the law allows and then push past them.
I’m not coming into this one cold. I’ve written about MAID before, and I lost my mother to stage 4 cancer, so I know what it looks like when assisted dying feels like a merciful choice. Rupa and I agree on that core concept: We both support the right to die for the genuinely terminally ill, and we’re both troubled by where Canada has gone. We also get into the harder questions: where the line should be, whether the slippery slope is real or whether places like Oregon show that states or countries can keep a narrow law intact, and what Canada’s expansion reveals about the values and perhaps the pathologies of modern Western society.
