Satire site The Babylon Bee recently ran the headline, ‘Canadian Healthcare System Introduces Punch Card Where On Your 10th Visit You Get Free Suicide.’ Sadly, the joke isn’t too far off from reality.
Earlier this year, I posted a meme on Facebook that brutally skewered Canada’s euthanasia regime. It showed an American doctor telling a patient his stitches would cost $58,000; a British doctor that the waitlist for stitches was 38 months; and a Canadian doctor solicitously inquiring: “Have you considered killing yourself?” (Another variation of the same meme has the doctor bluntly stating: “Kill yourself”—that’s because in Canada, we have the waitlistand the suicide.)
Facebook pulled the image and restricted my account. It violated their rules on the promotion of suicide. The Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP), however, operates freely on Facebook despite the fact that facilitating suicide is their entire job.
I’ve noted before in this space that Canada’s euthanasia regime has turned us into an international cautionary tale—a country where we can, as it turns out, have the worst of all worlds. We can have a woke government that talks constantly about helping the poor, but implements euthanasia policies that victimize them (leading to headlines in the international press such as: “Why is Canada euthanizing the poor?”) The steady conveyer belt of horror stories as disabled, sick, and desperate Canadians seek lethal injections—often the only “treatment” they’re eligible for in our broken system—makes the old Mitchell and Webb sketch seem plausible:
Consider that in the midst of all of this, the Trudeau government is—for the moment—still hellbent on expanding assisted suicide to the mentally ill in March, despite desperate calls to halt these plans from the psychiatric community, Canadian medical schools, suicide prevention experts, the disability community, and virtually everyone but the suicide enthusiasts at Dying with Dignity. It actually boggles the mind—the prime minister’s own mother has written several memoirs describing her own struggled with mental illness which would, come March, make her eligible to die under the regime her son has introduced.
As Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying) system continues to alleviate the pain of patients and the financial strain on the nation’s healthcare system, a recent innovation is expected to further improve results: Parliament just announced a punch card that allows patients to receive a free suicide after 10 doctor visits.
‘From a small-scale maple syrup overdose to a full-blown moose attack, you receive a punch on your card every time you are admitted for an injury or sickness.’ The Canadian Healthcare website published a blog this week outlining the new program.
‘Filling out your punch card is mandatory, for data tracking purposes. No one sick person can be allowed to drain more than their share of the taxpayer’s dollars!’
Trudeau praised the new initiative, positioning it as a way to better engage citizens and prevent any one citizen from becoming a burden on the system. ‘Canadians are team players,’ said Trudeau. ‘It’s important for every citizen to make sure he’s not wasting taxpayer money to sustain a life that’s not worth living. And now with this punch card, they know that with each hospital visit they’re one step closer to the end!’
For anyone offended by this, I would remind them that Canadians right across the country have been pro-actively offered assisted suicide by doctors—including military veterans suffering from PTSD. Cancer patients have been told that treatment that might save their lives is not available—but assisted suicide is. A disabled man in a hospital in London recorded an ethicist telling him that he should consider assisted suicide because his care was costing the system so much money. One Canadian doctor told me that his colleagues feel obligated to present “MAiD” as an option—and that increasingly, sick and vulnerable Canadians will feel obligated to take it.
More from The Bee:
Critics have contended that the new approach preys on disabled and impoverished Canadians who may see assisted suicide as their only option, but the criticism has already been quieted since Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau froze the bank accounts of anyone who spoke out against his regime’s policies in the comments section of the healthcare website’s blog, or on Twitter, or elsewhere. At publishing time, the burden on Canada’s healthcare system was further alleviated when Parliament announced that the policy would retroactively apply to people who had already been admitted for 10 prior hospital visits.
That sort of thing provokes what they call a “painful chuckle.” The truth is that, as Ross Douthat noted in the New York Times, Canada has already entered a truly dystopian period—when over 4% of recorded deaths are Canadians being lethally injected by doctors, we’re all the way down the slope and there’s a huge pile of corpses at the bottom. I really wish that article was more satirical than it is.
Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.
He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.
Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.
Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.
Canada’s rivers are vital to our environment and economy. Clean freshwater is essential to support recreation, agriculture and industry, an to sustain suitable habitat for wildlife. Conversely, degraded freshwater can make it harder to maintain safe drinking water and can harm aquatic life. So, how healthy are Canada’s rivers today?
To answer that question, Environment Canada uses an index of water quality to assess freshwater quality at monitoring stations across the country. In total, scores are available for 165 monitoring stations, jointly maintained by Environment Canada and provincial authorities, from 17 in Newfoundland and Labrador, to 8 in Saskatchewan and 20 in British Columbia.
This index works like a report card for rivers, converting water test results into scores from 0 to 100. Scientists sample river water three or more times per year at fixed locations, testing indicators such as oxygen levels, nutrients and chemical levels. These measurements are then compared against national and provincial guidelines that determine the ability of a waterway to support aquatic life.
Scores are calculated based on three factors: how many guidelines are exceeded, how often they are exceeded, and by how much they are exceeded. A score of 95-100 is “excellent,” 80-94 is “good,” 65-79 is “fair,” 45-64 is “marginal” and a score below 45 is “poor.” The most recent scores are based on data from 2021 to 2023.
Among 165 river monitoring sites across the country, the average score was 76.7. Sites along four major rivers earned a perfect score: the Northeast Magaree River (Nova Scotia), the Restigouche River (New Brunswick), the South Saskatchewan River (Saskatchewan) and the Bow River (Alberta). The Bayonne River, a tributary of the St. Lawrence River near Berthierville, Quebec, scored the lowest (33.0).
Overall, between 2021 and 2023, 83.0 per cent of monitoring sites across the country recorded fair to excellent water quality. This is a strong positive signal that most of Canada’s rivers are in generally healthy environmental condition.
A total of 13.3 per cent of stations were deemed to be marginal, that is, they received a score of 45-64 on the index. Only 3.6 per cent of monitoring sites fell into the poor category, meaning that severe degradation was limited to only a few sites (6 of 165).
Monitoring sites along waterways with relatively less development in the river’s headwaters and those with lower population density tended to earn higher scores than sites with developed land uses. However, among the 11 river monitoring sites that rated “excellent,” 8 were situated in areas facing a combination of pressures from nearby human activities that can influence water quality. This indicates the resilience of Canada’s river ecosystems, even in areas facing a combination of multiple stressors from urban runoff, agriculture, and industrial activities where waterways would otherwise be expected to be the most polluted.
Poor or marginal water quality was relatively more common in monitoring sites located along the St. Lawrence River and its major tributaries and near the Great Lakes compared to other regions. Among all sites in the marginal or poor category, 50 per cent were in this area. The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence region is one of the most population-dense and extensively developed parts of Canada, supporting a mix of urban, agricultural, and industrial land uses. These pressures can introduce harmful chemical contaminants and alter nutrient balances in waterways, impairing ecosystem health.
In general, monitoring sites categorized as marginal or poor tended to be located near intensive agriculture and industrial activities. However, it’s important to reiterate that only 28 stations representing 17.0 per cent of all monitoring stations were deemed to be marginal or poor.
Provincial results vary, as shown in the figure below. Water quality scores in Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and Alberta were, on average, 80 points or higher during the period from 2021 to 2023, indicating that water quality rarely departed from natural or desirable levels.
Rivers sites in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Manitoba and B.C. each had average scores between 74 and 78 points, suggesting occasional departures from natural or desirable levels.
Finally, Quebec’s average river water quality score was 64.5 during the 2021 to 2023 period. This score indicates that water quality departed from ideal conditions more frequently in Quebec than in other provinces, especially compared to provinces like Alberta, Saskatchewan and P.E.I. where no sites rated below “fair.”
Overall, these results highlight Canada’s success in maintaining a generally high quality of water in our rivers. Most waterways are in good shape, though some regions—especially near the Great Lakes and along the St. Lawrence River Valley—continue to face pressures from the combined effects of population growth and intensive land use.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade policy is often chaotic and punitive. But on one point, he is right: Canada’s agricultural supply management system has to go. Not because it is unfair to the United States, though it clearly is, but because it punishes Canadians. Supply management is a government-enforced price-fixing scheme that limits consumer choice, inflates grocery bills, wastes food, and shields a small, politically powerful group of producers from competition—at the direct expense of millions of households.
And yet Ottawa continues to support this socialist shakedown. Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters supply management was “not on the table” in negotiations for a renewed United States-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement, despite U.S. negotiators citing it as a roadblock to a new deal.
Supply management relies on a web of production quotas, fixed farmgate prices, strict import limits, and punitive tariffs that can approach 300 percent. Bureaucrats decide how much milk, chicken, eggs, and poultry Canadians farmers produce and which farmers can produce how much. When officials misjudge demand—as they recently did with chicken and eggs—farmers are legally barred from responding. The result is predictable: shortages, soaring prices, and frustrated consumers staring at emptier shelves and higher bills.
This is not a theoretical problem. Canada’s most recent chicken production cycle, ending in May 2025, produced one of the worst supply shortfalls in decades. Demand rose unexpectedly, but quotas froze supply in place. Canadian farmers could not increase production. Instead, consumers paid more for scarce domestic poultry while last-minute imports filled the gap at premium prices. Eggs followed a similar pattern, with shortages triggering a convoluted “allocation” system that opened the door to massive foreign imports rather than empowering Canadian farmers to respond.
Over a century of global experience has shown that central economic planning fails. Governments are simply not good at “matching” supply with demand. There is no reason to believe Ottawa’s attempts to manage a handful of food categories should fare any better. And yet supply management persists, even as its costs mount.
Those costs fall squarely on consumers. According to a Fraser Institute estimate, supply management adds roughly $375 a year to the average Canadian household’s grocery bill. Because lower-income families spend a much higher proportion of their income on food, the burden falls most heavily on them.
The system also strangles consumer choice. European countries produce thousands of varieties of high-quality cheeses at prices far below what Canadians pay for largely industrial domestic products. But our import quotas are tiny, and anything above them is hit with tariffs exceeding 245 percent. As a result, imported cheeses can cost $60 per kilogram or more in Canadian grocery stores. In Switzerland, one of the world’s most eye-poppingly expensive countries, where a thimble-sized coffee will set you back $9, premium cheeses are barely half the price you’ll find at Loblaw or Safeway.
Canada’s supply-managed farmers defend their monopoly by insisting it provides a “fair return” for famers, guarantees Canadians have access to “homegrown food” and assures the “right amount of food is produced to meet Canadian needs.” Is there a shred of evidence Canadians are being denied the “right amount” of bread, tuna, asparagus or applesauce? Of course not; the market readily supplies all these and many thousands of other non-supply-managed foods.
Like all price-fixing systems, Canada’s supply management provides only the illusion of stability and security. We’ve seen above what happens when production falls short. But perversely, if a farmer manages to get more milk out of his cows than his quota, there’s no reward: the excess must be
dumped. Last year alone, enough milk was discarded to feed 4.2 million people.
Over time, supply management has become less about farming and more about quota ownership. Artificial scarcity has turned quotas into highly valuable assets, locking out young farmers and rewarding incumbents.
Why does such a dysfunctional system persist? The answer is politics. Supply management is of outsized importance in Quebec, where producers hold a disproportionate share of quotas and are numerous enough to swing election results in key ridings. Federal parties of all stripes have learned the cost of crossing this lobby. That political cowardice now collides with reality. The USMCA is heading toward mandatory renegotiation, and supply management is squarely in Washington’s sights. Canada depends on tariff-free access to the U.S. market for hundreds of billions of dollars in exports. Trading away a deeply-flawed system to secure that access would make economic sense.
Instead, Ottawa has doubled down. Not just with Carney’s remarks last week but with Bill C-202, which makes it illegal for Canadian ministers to reduce tariffs or expand quotas on supply-managed goods in future trade talks. Formally signalling that Canada’s negotiating position is hostage to a tiny domestic lobby group is reckless, and weakens Canada’s hand before talks even begin.
Food prices continue to rise faster than inflation. Forecasts suggest the average family will spend $1,000 more on groceries next year alone. Supply management is not the only cause, but it remains a major one. Ending it would lower prices, expand choice, reduce waste, and reward entrepreneurial farmers willing to compete.
If Donald Trump can succeed in forcing supply management onto the negotiating table, he will be doing Canadian consumers—and Canadian agriculture—a favour our own political class has long refused to deliver.
