Not MAiD for This

Jan. 1, 2026

As euthanasia expands in Canada, Catholic groups offer hope, care and advocacy for those vulnerable to despair

By Nicholas Elbers

Jan. 1, 2026

Roger Foley (right), a man with an acute neurological disease with Lino DeFacendis (left) and Amber Scharf. — Roger Foley (right), a man with an acute neurological disease who was offered “medical assistance in dying” instead of adequate care, has received moral and financial support from Lino DeFacendis (left) and others. Amber Scharf (center) is a personal support worker for Foley made possible by a fundraising campaign. (Photo by Lino DeFacendis)

That Roger Foley would consider suicide, given his circumstances, is perhaps understandable: He has spent the last decade in a hospital bed with chronic pain. That his doctor would recommend it, however, is the stuff of nightmares. Yet such is the reality of Canadian health care nearly 10 years after the legalization of euthanasia, now known by the government’s Orwellian moniker Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).

Foley, a 49-year-old Ottawa native, lives with spinocerebellar ataxia type 14, a rare neurological disease that causes a lack of coordinated muscle movement, and other severe disabilities. After confiding in his doctor that he’d considered suicide and self-harm due to the apparent hopelessness of his situation, the doctor’s response was that MAiD might be something to consider. Suicide, he was effectively told, was not the problem — but the answer.

“It’s completely traumatized me,” Foley said in an interview with Amanda Achtman, founder of anti-euthanasia organization Dying To Meet You. “There is not going to be a second within the rest of my life that I’m not going to have flashbacks to it: the devaluing of me, and all that I am.”

Foley’s story reflects broader patterns that have emerged as a result of Canada’s rapid expansion of MAiD. The growing number of Canadians offered death alongside — or even instead of — treatment has raised urgent questions about medical culture, suicide prevention, and the duty of providing care. Across the country, ethicists, physicians, faith leaders, and advocates — many of them Knights of Columbus — warn that MAiD is reshaping how society understands suffering by withholding hope from those who need it most.

A SLIPPERY LEGISLATIVE SLOPE

According to Canada’s Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying that was released this past November, 16,499 people died by MAiD in 2024. Now surpassing 5% of all deaths in the country, the annual count has steadily increased more than 16-fold over the past decade.

This outcome was inevitable, said Euthanasia Prevention Coalition co-founder and executive director Alex Schadenberg, a member of Father John McMaster Council 6495 in West Lorne, Ontario.

“From the very beginning, the law was passed with no definition in its law,” said Schadenberg, who also serves as life director for the Ontario State Council. “It was intentionally vague … which caused serious problems from the beginning, but also has led to where we’re at today.”

The modern history of euthanasia in Canada began in 2009, when Québec’s National Assembly launched hearings through its Select Committee on Dying With Dignity.

Dr. Catherine Ferrier, a family physician and assistant professor of family medicine at McGill University in Montréal, recalled how abruptly the issue surfaced.

“In 2009, all of a sudden the College of Physicians of Québec started talking about whether euthanasia should be legal,” explained Ferrier, who serves as president of Physicians’ Alliance Against Euthanasia and is a board member of Living with Dignity. “Then it became clear that work had been done in many different levels for a while — kind of underground work.”

Deaths by euthanasia, as reported by Canada Health, have increased in Canada every year since medical assistance in dying was legalized in 2016. MAiD now accounts for over 5% of all annual deaths nationwide. (Emily Gedge / Euthanasia Prevention Coalition and Knights of Columbus Graphics Department)

The Select Committee’s 2012 report strongly recommended the creation of “medical aid in dying,” and in 2014, Québec became the first province to legalize euthanasia. Although the committee claimed to be examining end-of-life issues, Ferrier said, its focus was clearly on legalizing euthanasia.

“Two-thirds of the presentations were opposed to euthanasia, but the final report does not say that,” Ferrier noted. “The final report recommended that it become legal.”

Québec’s decision set the stage for the 2015 Supreme Court of Canada ruling in Carter v. Canada, which struck down the federal ban on physician-assisted suicide as unconstitutional. In 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, legalizing what it called “medical assistance in dying.”

The new law restricted eligibility to competent adults who had a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” and whose natural death was “reasonably foreseeable.” The government’s website adds, “The request cannot be the result of outside pressure or influence.”

Whether these criteria have been consistently followed remains a matter of debate. For example, reports have surfaced of veterans with PTSD being offered MAiD, raising concerns about coercion.

In 2020, Bill C-7 amended the criminal code, removing the requirement that a person’s death be reasonably foreseeable — meaning one no longer had to be dying to qualify. Initially, people with mental illness were excluded, but that exemption, too, proved short-lived.

Just a year later, Parliament extended MAiD to individuals whose sole condition is mental illness, with implementation delayed by two years. The rollout has since been postponed twice more and is now set for 2027.

Schadenberg sees the incremental expansion as the predictable result of the original law’s lack of clarity. “From 2016 to now, we went pretty quickly from [MAiD] being only for terminally ill people to people with disabilities of all types,” he said. “These are conscience questions that are seriously at risk here.”

CANADIAN CATHOLIC RESPONSE

As soon as assisted suicide was legalized, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops denounced the bill as “an affront to human dignity, an erosion of human solidarity, and a danger to all vulnerable persons — particularly the aged, disabled, infirm and sick who so often find themselves isolated and marginalized.”

The statement continued: “Moreover, it is a violation of the sacrosanct duty of health care providers to heal, and the responsibility of legislators and citizens to assure and provide protection for all.”

This theme was recently addressed by Dr. Yuriko Ryan, a Vancouver-based Catholic ethicist and gerontologist, in a Catholic Medical Association essay titled “Built to Coerce: Canada’s Living Laboratory of Euthanasia and the Call to Catholic Witness.”

Ryan recounted a visit to St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver with her husband, Dr. Christopher Ryan, a member of St. Patrick’s (Vancouver) Council 11748 who practiced as a family physician for 35 years in the Catholic-run hospital.

Stepping through a main entrance, the Ryans encountered a disturbing sight: a set of doors leading to a new MAiD facility the hospital had been compelled to allow by the provincial government.

“When healing and killing share a wall, corridor, and a roof … the very meaning of health care space is at stake,” Dr. Ryan wrote. “This forced presence demands collective moral reflection and renewed missional rigor — not only for Catholic health care organizations but for any organization striving to remain a witness to the dignity of life.”

She argued that the facility’s presence undermined patient well-being and the hospital’s identity by suggesting to vulnerable patients that their lives are burdensome.

“Naming this problem is only the beginning,” she said. “Silence would betray the witness to life that St. Paul’s demands.”

Dr. Ferrier expressed similar concerns. Simply hearing a doctor mention MAiD as an option, she said, can cause patients to lose hope.

“Even for a patient who is fairly stable and comfortable, a doctor’s mention of MAiD could give the impression it is the reasonable thing to do.”

She also warned of a chilling effect on pro-life medical professionals. “For young Catholic doctors who are opposed to MAiD to go into palliative care or other specialties where this is going to come up often, it’s a huge act of courage,” Ferrier said. “So they’ll go into something safe, and then those specialties will be dominated by people who are pro-MAiD.”

CREATING A CULTURE OF CARE

Anti-euthanasia advocates know it will take more than political action to counter MAiD’s expansion and influence in Canada.

Schadenberg emphasizes building a “culture of care” — one rooted in compassion and presence — as the most effective response to the fear and despair that often precede a MAiD request.

“If you want to create a culture of caring, it requires commitment to visiting people rather than letting them feel abandoned to death at their time of need,” he said. “It really does take a Christian community that cares and gives them hope.”

Pro-life advocates display signs defending life and opposing medical assistance in dying. — Pro-life advocates display signs defending life and opposing medical assistance in dying, or MAiD, during the National March for Life in Ottawa, Ontario, on May 8, 2025. (Courtesy of Campaign Life Coalition)

One group answering this call is the Catholic Health Association of Saskatchewan (CHAS). Peter Oliver, CHAS’s executive director and a member of St. Philip Neri Council 9539 in Saskatoon, explained that the organization is grounded in Christ’s healing ministry.

“The Eucharist is the source and summit of who we are,” Oliver said, “and so Catholic health care … arises out of the Church’s Eucharistic faith.”

CHAS provides leadership, education, and resources in ethics, mission, spiritual care, and social justice for health care professionals and others involved in “the healing ministry of Christ.”

“It’s not simply what happens in hospitals or in long-term care facilities,” Oliver said. “It’s what you do with prisoners and people on the street … what you do with your family.”

The Life Care Network, based in Ontario, likewise advocates for vulnerable Canadians, including Roger Foley. Its founder, Lino DeFacendis — a member of St. Joseph the Worker Council 10531 in Thornhill — was inspired to start the organization after caring for his dying parents.

In Foley’s case, help came through a three-month LifeFunder campaign that launched Sept. 30 with a goal of $40,000.

“Mentally, he’s one of the sharpest people I’ve ever met,” DeFacendis said. “Yet it was painful to see that, despite a lot of reporting about him, no one was really helping him … How could you not help this guy?”

Life Care Network has also advocated for Foley with the hospital where he has received treatment for nearly a decade.

Kathy Matusiak Costa, who first brought Foley’s plight to DeFacendis’ attention, is executive director of Compassionate Community Care, which supports people affected by MAiD. The group runs a 24-7 hotline and offers counseling to those considering MAiD — and to families grieving a loved one lost to it.

“By speaking to someone, you fill that gap left by loneliness or lack of community,” she said. “You speak life into them, and you speak hope, and when a person feels that they are a part of a significant community, the need for euthanasia ultimately disappears.”

Such community doesn’t just help the person at risk, Costa said. It also brings meaning to the lives of those who surround them.

She shared the story of a young woman who called about her grandmother, who was choosing MAiD to avoid an amputation and who, like many in that situation, feared being a burden.

After some help from Costa, the young woman was able to rally the family to support their grandmother. She died shortly after the date she had originally scheduled MAiD — surrounded by loved ones.

“This will be a lasting memory,” Costa said. “It will have an impact on the family for the rest of their lives.”

Schadenberg offers a final challenge to Catholics: “You can make a difference,” he recently told a group of parishioners in Langley, British Columbia. “You can be the person who helps someone find meaning and value in their lives.”

He added: “There is nothing easy about this situation, but the answer to this evil of killing is to love each other.”

*****

NICHOLAS ELBERS is the staff writer and photographer for The B.C. Catholic, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Vancouver. He is a member of Catholic Pacific College Council 15574 in Langley, British Columbia, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Chana Gaskins and her three children enjoy some time playing outside.

Not MAiD for This

A SLIPPERY LEGISLATIVE SLOPE

CANADIAN CATHOLIC RESPONSE

CREATING A CULTURE OF CARE

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