With the world focused on the Olympics, the American elections, the war in Gaza, and the shifting balance of war in Ukraine, the topic of assisted dying is flying under the radar.

But in the United Kingdom, it is high up on the political agenda. Lord Falconer, a former Lord Chancellor who has been lobbying for legalisation of assisted dying for years, says that with Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, Britons have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to change the law.

“This is such an opportunity,” he told The Observer. “The last time this was voted upon, there was a clear vote against it in the Commons. But of the 650 MPs who were present in 2015, 477 of them have gone. It’s a completely new House of Commons with a wholly new atmosphere, with a prime minister who is saying: ‘You must decide as a free vote – and if you decide in favour, the government will make sure that procedural stratagems don’t doom the bill.’”

As columnist Polly Toynbee, an ever-reliable voice for progressive policies, put it: “It will join the roll call of great liberal reforms that only happen under Labour.” (These include abortion and divorce reform, gay rights, ending the death penalty, decriminalising suicide, and reform of obscenity laws.)

Whoa! First, take a good look at Canada.

That is probably the best riposte to anyone who is in favour of legalising euthanasia and assisted suicide in the UK or in the US.

Canadian experience

Canada legalised “medical assistance in dying”, or MAiD, as it is commonly called there, in 2016. A report published last week by Cardus, a Canadian think tank, analyses the incredible growth of MAiD since then. In 2016, there were 1,018 MAiD deaths; in 2022, the last year for which figures are available, there were 13,241. That’s roughly a 13-fold increase in seven years. “MAiD in Canada is the world’s fastest-growing assisted-dying program,” says the Cardus report.

MAID now accounts for at least four percent of deaths in Canada – one in 25. It is the fifth highest cause of death, together with cerebrovascular diseases. And since statistics about MAiD are not collected in a consistent way at a provincial level, the figure could be higher.

The government’s original projection of MAiD deaths fell far short of reality. It had estimated that it would reach that level in the mid-2030s. Hardly anyone anticipated how “popular” MAiD would become. In 2020, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, possibly the world’s leading medical journal, stated that “approximately 2000 euthanasia cases are expected in Canada each year.” In 2020, there were 7,611 of them.

Furthermore, in Canada, patients can be euthanised even if they do not have a terminal illness, even if they say that they are going to refuse treatment for their condition, and even if they don’t have access to life-saving treatment. A number of disturbing stories have emerged in the media about people who asked for MAiD simply because they couldn’t access adequate government health care.