by Matthew Hall on X
In May 2024 I was a reluctant witness to my aunt’s euthanasia in Canada and in September of that year I wrote an article in The Spectator describing the sinister seductiveness of the process. Ten weeks following her diagnosis of early stage motor neurone disease and having received no counselling or detailed advice on alternative courses of action, she was able to lift the phone on a Sunday afternoon and arrange for the local euthanist – a former family doctor – to administer a lethal injection in her front room a little over 48 hours later.
She was depressed and still reeling, I am sure of it, but the system had her in a body bag in a fraction of the time it takes to get a GP appointment. They really have invested money and resources into quick despatch.
Dial-a-death has become a common procedure in outwardly civilised Canada since it first introduced MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) in 2016. In 2025 there were 16,500 deaths by this method, accounting for approximately 5.1% of the national total. During the first full year of MAiD, 2017, the number who died by this method was a mere 1,838. It has caught on quickly. I spoke to a lot of people in the theatre town of Stratford, Ontario, where my aunt lived, and learned that among progressives, support for this novel method of departure is near universal. In fact, I was left feeling it has become a shibboleth as sacred as the right to abortion.
Kim Leadbetter MP and Lord Falconer, the sponsors of the Terminally Ill (Adults) End of Life Bill, currently absorbing so much parliamentary time, assure us such wholesale death on demand could never happen here. As drafted, the Bill only offers medically assisted death to adults of full mental capacity who can reasonably be expected to live less than six months. The proposed procedure involving assessments by two doctors and an expert panel, all overseen by a commissioner, is complex and cumbersome. By the time all the filters and safeguards are applied, we are assured the number of successful candidates will be in the tens or hundreds, not thousands.