This article supplied by Troy Media.

By Daniel Zekveld

Canadians need real mental health support, not state-sanctioned suicide

If the law Parliament plans to roll out in 2027 had been on the books 15 years ago, Member of Parliament Andrew Lawton says he’d probably be dead. He’s not exaggerating. He’s referring to Canada’s scheduled expansion of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) to include people suffering only from mental illness.

Lawton, who survived a suicide attempt during a period of deep depression, knows what’s at stake. So do others who’ve shared similar stories. What they needed back then wasn’t a government-approved exit plan. They needed care, time, and something MAiD quietly discards: the possibility of recovery.

MAiD, medical assistance in dying, was legalized in Canada in 2016 for people with grievous and irremediable physical conditions. The 2027 expansion would, for the first time, allow people to request MAiD solely on the basis of a mental illness, even if they have no physical illness or terminal condition.

With the expansion now delayed to March 2027, Parliament will once again have to decide whether it wants to cross this particular moral threshold. Although the legislation was passed in 2021, it has never come into force. First pushed back to 2024, then to 2027, it remains stalled, not because of foot-dragging, but due to intense medical, ethical and public concern.

Parliament should scrap the expansion altogether.

A 2023 repeal attempt came surprisingly close—just 17 votes short, at 167 to 150. That’s despite unanimous support from Conservative, NDP and Green MPs. You read that right: all three parties, often at each other’s throats, agreed that death should not be an option handed out for depression.

Their concern wasn’t just ethical, it was practical. The core issues remain unresolved. There’s no consensus on whether mental illness is ever truly irremediable—whether it can be cured, improved or even reliably assessed as hopeless. Ask 10 psychiatrists and you’ll get 12 opinions. Recovery isn’t rare. But authorizing MAiD sends the opposite message: that some people’s pain is permanent, and the only answer is to make it stop—permanently.

Meanwhile, access to real mental health care is sorely lacking. A 2023 Angus Reid Institute poll found 40 per cent of Canadians who needed treatment faced barriers getting it. Half of Canadians said they outright oppose the expansion. Another 21 per cent weren’t sure—perhaps assuming Canada wouldn’t actually go through with something so dystopian. But 82 per cent agreed on one thing: don’t even think about expanding MAiD before fixing the mental health system.

That disconnect between what people need and what they’re being offered leads to a more profound contradiction. Canada spends millions promoting suicide prevention. There are hotlines, campaigns and mental health initiatives. Offering MAiD to people in crisis sends a radically different message: suicide prevention ends where bureaucracy begins.

Even Quebec, normally Canada’s most enthusiastic adopter of progressive policy experiments, has drawn the line. The province has said mental disorders don’t qualify for MAiD, period. Most provincial premiers and health ministers have called for an indefinite delay.

Internationally, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has condemned Canada’s approach and urged the government not to proceed. Taken together, the message is clear: both at home and abroad, there’s serious alarm over where this policy leads.

With mounting opposition and the deadline for implementation approaching in 2027, Parliament will again revisit the issue this fall.

A private member’s bill from MP Tamara Jansen, Bill C-218, which seeks to repeal the 2027 expansion clause, will bring the issue back to the floor for debate.

Her speech introducing the bill asked MPs to imagine someone’s child, broken by job loss or heartbreak, reaching a dark place. “Imagine they feel a loss so deep they are convinced the world would be better off without them,” she said. “Our society could end a person’s life solely for a mental health challenge.”

That isn’t compassion. That’s surrender.

Expanding MAiD to mental illness risks turning a temporary crisis into a permanent decision. It treats pain as untreatable, despair as destiny, and bureaucracy as wisdom. It signals to the vulnerable that Canada is no longer offering help—just a final form to sign.

Parliament still has time to reverse course. It should reject the expansion, reinvest in suicide prevention and reassert that mental suffering deserves treatment—not a state-sanctioned exit.

Daniel Zekveld is a Policy Analyst with the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) Canada.

Explore more on Euthanasia, Assisted suicide, Mental health, Human Rights, Ethics

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Across Canada, over 1.2 million patients left emergency rooms untreated last year.

The number of patients leaving Alberta’s emergency rooms without being treated is rising, reveals a report published this morning by the MEI.

“These patients are not leaving because they feel better, but because the system is failing them,” says Emmanuelle B. Faubert, economist at the MEI and author of the report. “Thousands of Albertans are being denied access to care each year.”

In 2024, Alberta recorded nearly 2.3 million emergency room visits. Of these, 199,615 ended with a patient leaving before receiving treatment, representing 8.8 per cent of all visits.

This marks a worsening trend, with the ratio of patients leaving surging by 76.5 per cent since 2019. Patients in Alberta walk away from emergency rooms without receiving care at a rate that is higher than the national average of 7.8 per cent.

Across Canada, 16.3 million emergency room visits were made last year, and 1,267,736 patients were left untreated—around one in every thirteen visits. This data doesn’t include patients living in Saskatchewan, or those covered by New Brunswick’s Vitalité Santé health network, those health authorities having both failed to provide the requested 2024 data in time for publication.

The deterioration is observed nationwide, as rates of premature departures have risen significantly since 2019. Last year, the number of Canadian patients leaving without treatment increased by 35.6 per cent.

In Alberta, nearly half of those who leave without treatment are classified as P3, which are cases that are not life-threatening but still require urgent medical attention.

“This is particularly troubling as it means patients are sent back to the waiting room despite a very real risk of deterioration,” says Ms. Faubert.

The MEI researcher emphasized that patients forced to delay or forgo care often end up suffering from worsening conditions, which lead to more complex cases.

In a U.S. study conducted between 2019 and 2020, researchers found that 55 per cent of patients who left an emergency room before being treated ended up consulting a healthcare professional within three weeks of their initial visit.

The MEI recommends increasing access to upstream care, which includes:

 Increasing the use of specialized nurse practitioner clinics;
 Granting the broadest scope of practice to pharmacists; and
 Allowing for the creation of non-governmental Immediate Care Medical Centres, based on the French model, to treat non-life-threatening emergencies.

“Solving the crisis in primary care is essential if we want to keep patients from continuing to fall through the cracks,” says Ms. Faubert. “Policymakers must find the political courage to open up healthcare delivery to independent and alternative providers, or else this crisis is bound to get worse.”

The MEI Economic Note is available here: https://www.iedm.org/wpcontent/uploads/2025/09/economic-note-102025.pdf
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The MEI is an independent public policy think tank with offices in Montreal, Ottawa, and Calgary. Through its publications, media appearances, and advisory services to policymakers, the MEI stimulates public policy debate and reforms based on sound economics and entrepreneurship.