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.
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The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms announces that Ontario resident George Katerberg has launched a legal challenge against the Ontario Ministry of Transportation for banning roadside billboards with social or political messages. Mr. Katerberg believes that the Ministry’s policies go too far and undermine the freedom of expression of all Ontarians.
This case goes back to March 2024, when Mr. Katerberg, a retired HVAC technician, rented a billboard on Highway 17 near Thessalon, Ontario, that featured images of public health officials and politicians alongside a message critical of their statements about vaccines.
After the Ministry rejected his proposed billboard several times on the grounds it promoted hatred, a constitutional challenge was launched with lawyers provided by the Justice Centre. Mr. Katerberg’s lawyers argued that the Ministry’s position was unreasonable, and that it did not balance Charter rights with the purposes of relevant legislation.
The Ministry later admitted that the sign did not violate hate speech guidelines and agreed to reconsider erecting the billboard.
However, in April 2025, the Ministry quietly amended its policy manual to restrict signs along “bush highways” to those only promoting goods, services, or authorized community events.
The new guidelines are sweeping and comprehensive, barring any messaging that the Ministry claims could “demean, denigrate, or disparage one or more identifiable persons, groups of persons, firms, organizations, industrial or commercial activities, professions, entities, products or services…”
Relying on this new policy, the Ministry once again denied Mr. Katerberg’s revised billboard.
Constitutional lawyer Chris Fleury explains, “By amending the Highway Corridor Management Manual to effectively prohibit signage that promotes political and social causes, the Ministry of Transportation has turned Mr. Katerberg’s fight to raise his sign into a fight on behalf of all Ontarians who wish to express support for a political or social cause.”
No date has yet been assigned for a hearing on this matter.
If Prime Minister Carney really wants to show he’s committed to “Building Canada” he’d ceremoniously defenestrate Bill C-48, scap the cap on Canadian Oil and Gas related greehhouse gas emissions, and ax the so-called Clean Electricity Regulations
As pretty much everyone knows, Canada has a building problem. Whether it’s provincial building of housing or infrastructure, or national building of highways, pipelines or energy production facilities, Canada can seemingly not get things built no matter how many companies and investors propose projects (or how many newspaper opinion columns or public opinion polls shows that people want things built).
The Carney government appears to recognize this problem and recently introduced Bill C-5. Of course, appearances can be deceiving. Superficially, a lot of what’s in the proposed bill sounds good: facilitating free trade and labour mobility inter-provincially, and ostensibly streamlining government’s regulatory powers to facilitate the timely building of projects deemed to be in Canada’s national interests. Who could be against that?
Per the government, the “Bill seeks to get projects in the national interest built by focusing on a small number of executable projects and shifting the focus of federal reviews from ‘whether’ to build these projects to ‘how’ to best advance them.” Again, looks great, but even a cursory reading by a legal layman reveals the fact that, in reality, little has changed in regard to the approval of major building projects in Canada. Just as it is now, under the new regime, the prime minister’s office (and designees elsewhere in government) ultimately have carte blanche in deciding whether or not projects of significance can be built in Canada, under what timeline, and based on whatever criteria they deem appropriate.
All that is better than nothing, of course, but words (particularly political words) are cheap and actions more valuable. If Prime Minister Carney really wants to show he’s committed to “Building Canada” he’d ceremoniously defenestrate Bill C-48 (a.k.a. the “Tanker Ban Bill”), which came into effect last year under the Trudeau government and changed tanker regulations off British Columbia’s northern coast, torpedoing any prospects of building oil export pipelines on Canada’s west coast.
He could also scrap the cap on Canadian oil and gas-related greenhouse gas emissions (introduced by the Trudeau government in 2024) and regulations (also introduced in 2024) for methane emissions in the oil and gas sector, both of which will almost inevitably raise costs and curtail production.
Finally, the prime minister could ax the so-called “Clean Electricity Regulations” that will likely drive electricity rates through the roof while ushering in an age of less-reliable electricity supply and less building of conventional energy-generation from natural gas, a fuel far more reliable than Canada’s fickle winds and often-tepid sunlight. By driving up energy costs across Canada and through the entire chain of production and service economies, these regulations (again, enacted by the Trudeau government) will make it more expensive to build anything anywhere in Canada.
Prime Minister Carney has made some nice noises seemingly recognizing that Canada has a building problem, particularly with regard to energy projects, and Bill C-5 makes equally nice (yet ill-defined) noises about regulatory reform in the energy and natural resource sectors. But Canada doesn’t have a shortage of nebulous government pronouncements; it has an overdose of regulatory restrictions preventing building in Canada. He should show real seriousness and eliminate the raft of Trudeau-era red tape stifling growth and development in Canada.
And sooner is better than later. Canada’s biggest economic competitors (not only the United States) are not sitting on their red-taped hands watching their economies decline.
