MP who attempted suicide launches campaign against expanding euthanasia for mental illness

MP Andrew Lawton said he might be dead if a bill currently being debated in Canada to include mental illness as a condition for assisted suicide was the law when he tried to take his life.

A Conservative MP who almost died in a suicide attempt 15 years ago launched an initiative to help those struggling with mental illness choose life and to help stop a plan by the Canadian government to expand euthanasia to those with mental illness.

The initiative, led by newly elected Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MP Andrew Lawton and called ‘I Got Better’: Stop MAID for Mental Illness, was launched Thursday.

“Fifteen years ago, I almost lost my life to suicide. It wasn’t my first suicide attempt, but it was by far the most serious. I intentionally overdosed on several medications and ended up on life support and in a coma for several weeks. This wasn’t a cry for help. I wanted to die,” Lawson said in a video posted to X.

Lawson noted how the changes coming in 2027 to Canada’s euthanasia laws, or “medical assistance in dying” (MAiD) – a euphemism for assisted suicide as it’s known — that someone like him experiencing what he suffered years ago “would be able to get a doctor to help them end their life.”

“Simply put, if the law on the books now were there 15 years ago, I’d probably be dead right now. What I went through didn’t happen overnight. Through much of my teenage years and into my early 20s, I battled severe depression. I would have good days and bad days, but I started to have more and more bad days,” he said.

Lawson observed how at a certain point in time he could not “take it anymore” and thus crafted a plan to end his life.

“This wasn’t a rash or impulsive decision. I scheduled it weeks out. Those closest to me had no idea what I was going through,” he said.

“I did have a support system I could have leaned on. I had plenty of opportunities to change my mind or seek help, but I didn’t. I was that committed. I was that stubborn. In my story and those of countless others, the desire to end my life was a symptom of my mental illness.”

Canada needs to protect vulnerable, says MP

LifeSiteNews reported on Bill C-218, noting that Jansen said allowing “medical assistance in dying” (MAiD) – a euphemism for assisted suicide – for those with mental illness is “not healthcare, that’s not compassion, it’s abandonment.”

“Mental illness is treatable. Recovery is possible, but only if we show up and help,” she told fellow MPs.

Jansen’s Bill C-218 reads, “This enactment amends the Criminal Code to provide that a mental disorder is not a grievous and irremediable medical condition for which a person could receive medical assistance in dying.”

Lawson said that Canada needs to make sure that people struggling with mental illness are given the “help” they need to stay alive.

“I’m proud to stand behind Bill C-218, a private member’s bill tabled by my colleague Tamara Jansen. If passed, this bill will ensure mental illness can’t be used as justification for someone to end their life with MAID,” he said.

Lawson warned that when it comes to suicide, being a “rational thinker” can be “even more dangerous as you convince yourself that suicide is a sensible or logical course of action, but it isn’t because it’s based on an inherently flawed belief that what you’re experiencing can never get better.”

“We can’t give up on each other. The pain that mental illness causes is real and it is hard, but it isn’t permanent. Bill C-218 is about ensuring we keep hope alive for people struggling with mental illness, that we give them a right to recover. I got better and others can too,” he said.

The Conservative Party has attempted to oppose the expansion of euthanasia for some time, but recent legislative attempts to stop the expansion outright, instead of just delaying it, such as through Bill C-314, have failed.

Assisted suicide was legalized by the Liberal government of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016.

Under the current law, assisted suicide is prohibited for minors and the mentally ill. Activists, however, have been pushing for these expansions with varying degrees of success.

In 2021, the Trudeau government expanded euthanasia from killing only “terminally ill” patients to allowing the chronically ill to qualify after the passage of Bill C-7. Since then, the government has sought to include those suffering solely from mental illness.

In February 2024 after pushback from pro-life, medical, and mental health groups as well as most of Canada’s provinces, the federal government delayed the mental illness expansion until 2027.

The expansion of euthanasia for the mentally ill is slated to become law in 2027 due to the passage of Bill C-7.

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Health

All 12 Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated Studies Found the Same Thing: Unvaccinated Children Are Far Healthier

Published on December 25, 2025

Todayville

By Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

I joined Del Bigtree in studio on The HighWire to discuss what the data now make unavoidable: the CDC’s 81-dose hyper-vaccination schedule is driving the modern epidemics of chronic disease and autism.

This was not a philosophical debate or a clash of opinions. We walked through irrefutable, peer-reviewed evidence showing that whenever vaccinated and unvaccinated children are compared directly, the unvaccinated group is far healthier—every single time.

Click here to see the video

Reanalyzing the Largest Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated Birth-Cohort Study Ever Conducted

At the center of our discussion was our peer-reviewed reanalysis of the Henry Ford Health System vaccinated vs. unvaccinated birth-cohort study (Lamerato et al.)—the largest and most rigorous comparison of its kind ever conducted.

BREAKING: Peer-Reviewed Reanalysis of the Henry Ford Birth Cohort Study Finds Vaccinated Children Sicker Across All 22 Chronic Disease Categories

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Dec 11

Read full story

The original authors relied heavily on Cox proportional hazards models, a time-adjusted approach that can soften absolute disease burden. Even so, nearly all chronic disease outcomes were higher in vaccinated children.

Our reanalysis used direct proportional comparisons, stripping away the smoothing and revealing the full magnitude of the signal.

All 22 chronic disease categories favored the unvaccinated cohort when proportional disease burden was examined
Cancer incidence was 54% higher in vaccinated children (0.0102 vs. 0.0066)
When autism-associated conditions were grouped appropriately—including autism, ADHD, developmental delay, learning disability, speech disorder, neurologic impairment, seizures, and related diagnoses—the vaccinated cohort showed a 549% higher odds of autism-spectrum–associated clinical outcomes

The findings are internally consistent, biologically coherent, and concordant with every prior vaccinated vs. unvaccinated study, all of which show drastically poorer health outcomes among vaccinated children

The 12 Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated Studies Regulators Ignore

In the McCullough Foundation Autism Report, we compiled all 12 vaccinated vs. unvaccinated pediatric studies currently available. These studies span different populations, countries, study designs, and data sources.

Every single one reports the same overall pattern. Across all 12 studies, unvaccinated children consistently exhibit substantially lower rates of chronic disease, including:

Autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders
ADHD, tics, learning and speech disorders
Asthma, allergies, eczema, and autoimmune conditions
Chronic ear infections, skin disorders, and gastrointestinal illness

This level of consistency across independent datasets is precisely what epidemiology looks for when assessing causality. It also explains why no federal agency has ever conducted—or endorsed—a fully vaccinated vs. fully unvaccinated safety study.

Flu Shot Failure

We also addressed the persistent failure of seasonal influenza vaccination.

A large Cleveland Clinic cohort study of 53,402 employees followed participants during the 2024–2025 respiratory viral season and found:

82.1% of employees were vaccinated against influenza
Vaccinated individuals had a 27% higher adjusted risk of influenza compared with the unvaccinated state (HR 1.27; 95% CI 1.07–1.51; p = 0.007)
This corresponded to a negative vaccine effectiveness of −26.9% (95% CI −55.0 to −6.6%), meaning vaccination was associated with increased—not reduced—risk of influenza

When vaccination exposure increases, chronic disease, neurodevelopmental disorders, and inflammatory illness increase with it. When children are unvaccinated, they are measurably healthier across virtually every outcome that matters.

The science needed to confront the chronic disease and autism epidemics already exists. What remains is the willingness to acknowledge it.

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

Support our mission: mcculloughfnd.org

Please consider following both the McCullough Foundation and my personal account on X (formerly Twitter) for further content.

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Alberta

A Christmas wish list for health-care reform

Published on December 23, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Nadeem Esmail and Mackenzie Moir

It’s an exciting time in Canadian health-care policy. But even the slew of new reforms in Alberta only go part of the way to using all the policy tools employed by high performing universal health-care systems.

For 2026, for the sake of Canadian patients, let’s hope Alberta stays the path on changes to how hospitals are paid and allowing some private purchases of health care, and that other provinces start to catch up.

While Alberta’s new reforms were welcome news this year, it’s clear Canada’s health-care system continued to struggle. Canadians were reminded by our annual comparison of health care systems that they pay for one of the developed world’s most expensive universal health-care systems, yet have some of the fewest physicians and hospital beds, while waiting in some of the longest queues.

And speaking of queues, wait times across Canada for non-emergency care reached the second-highest level ever measured at 28.6 weeks from general practitioner referral to actual treatment. That’s more than triple the wait of the early 1990s despite decades of government promises and spending commitments. Other work found that at least 23,746 patients died while waiting for care, and nearly 1.3 million Canadians left our overcrowded emergency rooms without being treated.

At least one province has shown a genuine willingness to do something about these problems.

The Smith government in Alberta announced early in the year that it would move towards paying hospitals per-patient treated as opposed to a fixed annual budget, a policy approach that Quebec has been working on for years. Albertans will also soon be able purchase, at least in a limited way, some diagnostic and surgical services for themselves, which is again already possible in Quebec. Alberta has also gone a step further by allowing physicians to work in both public and private settings.

While controversial in Canada, these approaches simply mirror what is being done in all of the developed world’s top-performing universal health-care systems. Australia, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland all pay their hospitals per patient treated, and allow patients the opportunity to purchase care privately if they wish. They all also have better and faster universally accessible health care than Canada’s provinces provide, while spending a little more (Switzerland) or less (Australia, Germany, the Netherlands) than we do.

While these reforms are clearly a step in the right direction, there’s more to be done.

Even if we include Alberta’s reforms, these countries still do some very important things differently.

Critically, all of these countries expect patients to pay a small amount for their universally accessible services. The reasoning is straightforward: we all spend our own money more carefully than we spend someone else’s, and patients will make more informed decisions about when and where it’s best to access the health-care system when they have to pay a little out of pocket.

The evidence around this policy is clear—with appropriate safeguards to protect the very ill and exemptions for lower-income and other vulnerable populations, the demand for outpatient healthcare services falls, reducing delays and freeing up resources for others.

Charging patients even small amounts for care would of course violate the Canada Health Act, but it would also emulate the approach of 100 per cent of the developed world’s top-performing health-care systems. In this case, violating outdated federal policy means better universal health care for Canadians.

These top-performing countries also see the private sector and innovative entrepreneurs as partners in delivering universal health care. A relationship that is far different from the limited individual contracts some provinces have with private clinics and surgical centres to provide care in Canada. In these other countries, even full-service hospitals are operated by private providers. Importantly, partnering with innovative private providers, even hospitals, to deliver universal health care does not violate the Canada Health Act.

So, while Alberta has made strides this past year moving towards the well-established higher performance policy approach followed elsewhere, the Smith government remains at least a couple steps short of truly adopting a more Australian or European approach for health care. And other provinces have yet to even get to where Alberta will soon be.

Let’s hope in 2026 that Alberta keeps moving towards a truly world class universal health-care experience for patients, and that the other provinces catch up.