Experts say Canada’s MAiD growth reflects deeper cultural changes, eroded values, and rising pressure on the sick and disabled.
Newsroom (05/05/2026 Gaudium Press ) Canada’s rapid embrace of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) is being read by critics as more than a policy shift. They argue it reflects a deeper cultural turn toward autonomy, self-fulfilment, and the weakening of shared moral limits.
A culture shaped by the self
Theologian and sociologist Germain McKenzie links the popularity of MAiD to long-running Western cultural trends, especially the Enlightenment’s stress on autonomous reasoning and Romanticism’s celebration of self-fulfilment. He says those ideas have been reinforced by capitalism’s utilitarian ethic, mass media, and medical advances, while Christian values have steadily eroded.
McKenzie argues that the postwar period accelerated this shift, leaving individuals trying to construct their own moral universe. In his view, that has helped normalize something that once seemed unthinkable outside dystopian fiction: legalized medical killing.
Numbers that alarm critics
Canada recorded 16,499 euthanasia deaths in 2024, more than five percent of all deaths in the country, according to Health Canada’s Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying. The same report said 4.4 per cent of MAiD deaths were Track 2 cases, meaning the person’s natural death was not reasonably foreseeable.
Critics say the scale of those numbers points to more than individual choice. Eoin Connolly of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute says many people appear to be choosing MAiD within a context of unmet needs, inadequate community support, and a culture that treats dependency as a loss of worth.
Pressure on the vulnerable
Disability advocate and UBC law professor Isabel Grant says MAiD has been “sanitized and romanticized” in ways that make death seem compassionate even when the person with a disability might otherwise continue living. She says the expansion of MAiD has changed the experience of life in Canada for disabled people by reinforcing the idea that some are better off dead.
Grant also says the existence of MAiD can be coercive for people with disabilities because it makes death a readily available option when support is lacking. She points to concerns raised by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which questioned whether Canada’s system amounts to a de facto eugenics program aimed at the disabled.
Family and clinical fallout
The article also describes emotional fallout for families and health-care workers. Catholic psychologist Denis Boyd says some clients have reported being directly offered euthanasia without requesting it, while families opposing a loved one’s MAiD decision may be left angry, traumatized, or reluctant to grieve openly.
Boyd says these cases can create conflict not only inside families but also in hospitals, where MAiD is increasingly presented as one treatment option among others. Critics say that normalization risks pressuring patients who are already frightened, isolated, or burdened by illness.
A wider moral warning
For opponents, the concern is not only the expansion of assisted dying but the message it sends. Patricia Murphy says MAiD can imply that some lives are expendable, while Alex Schadenberg argues that society has lost sight of how precious life is and too often presents death as an escape from suffering.
That is why critics fear the debate is no longer limited to end-of-life care. They say it now reaches into the deepest questions of medicine, disability, and social obligation: whether a society still sees the sick, elderly, and disabled as people to be cared for, or as lives that can be quietly set aside.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from BC Catholic
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