The Quiet Violence of Neglect

Canada’s assisted-death regime has reached a point most people assumed was dystopian fiction and it’s doing so with bureaucratic calm. A woman in Saskatchewan, Jolene Van Alstine, suffering from a rare but treatable parathyroid disease, has applied for MAiD not because she is dying, but because she can’t access the surgery that would let her live.

Read that again. Not terminal. Not untreatable. Just abandoned by a system that has the audacity to call itself “universal.”

Her assisted death is scheduled for January 7, 2026.

And the country shrugs. Van Alstine described spending years curled on a couch, nauseated, in agony, isolated, and pushed past endurance. The disease is brutal, but treatable a surgery here, a specialist there. The kind of medical intervention that in a functional system wouldn’t even make the news.

But in Saskatchewan? There are no endocrinologists accepting new patients. Without one, she can’t get referred. Without a referral, she can’t get surgery. Without surgery, she loses her life either slowly through suffering, or quickly through state-sanctioned death.

If you’ve ever lived through pain that warps time…
If you’ve ever had your mind hijacked by trauma…
If you’ve ever stared down suffering with no end in sight…

You know how thin the line can get between endurance and surrender.

And that’s why this story hits differently: it reveals how fragile people become when the system meant to protect them becomes an accomplice in their despair.

Canada frames MAiD as empowerment. As compassion. As choice.

But choice is only real when the alternatives are viable.
If your options are slow agony or assisted death, that’s not autonomy it’s coercion with a friendly tone.

Disability advocates, chronic-pain patients, the elderly, and low-income Canadians have been sounding the alarm for years: MAiD is expanding faster than support systems can catch up. Every expansion widens the chasm between the rhetoric of compassion and the lived experience of those who actually need help.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission itself warned that MAiD is being accessed because people cannot get the services required to live with dignity. And dignity matters. Anyone who has lived on the edge knows this: humans don’t just need survival, we need a reason to keep surviving.

When the healthcare system withholds that, death can look like mercy. This is the part polite society doesn’t want to confront.

Canada’s healthcare system is collapsing. Not strained. Not overburdened. Collapsing.

We have a growing list of citizens choosing death because medicine has become a lottery →
• a quadriplegic woman who applied for MAiD because she couldn’t secure basic home-care support
• veterans offered MAiD instead of trauma treatment
• homeless Canadians considering MAiD because they can’t survive winter

And now a woman denied a simple, lifesaving surgery.

At some point, we have to call this what it is: a nation outsourcing its failures to death. I’ve sat with veterans who couldn’t find themselves inside their own minds after war. I’ve watched people suffer silently because bureaucracy didn’t move fast enough to keep up with their pain.

I’ve coached clients who were one dropped ball, one missed appointment, one shut door away from losing the will to fight.

The lesson is the same every time. People don’t break because they’re weak. People break because they’re left alone with their suffering.

Van Alstine wasn’t offered community.
She wasn’t offered care.
She was offered an exit.

And she took it.

Not because she wanted to die but because Canada didn’t give her any path to live.

We need to stop pretending this is compassionate. Compassion is presence. Compassion is support. Compassion is a surgeon who actually exists, a referral that actually happens, a system that catches someone before they fall into the dark.

If MAiD is going to exist, it must be the last, quiet, grave option not the discounted aisle Canada sends you to when the cost of real care is too high.

A society reveals its soul by how it treats the people who can’t fight for themselves.
Right now, Canada is revealing something hollow.

People will debate the ethics of assisted dying forever. Fine. Debate it. But this is the wrong battleground. The real question is this →

What does it say about a country when death is easier to access than medical care?

Until Canada answers that honestly, we’re going to see more names on the calendar scheduled deaths, stamped and approved — for people who didn’t want to die. They just wanted someone to give them a chance to live.

Canada has failed every single citizen, and not a single person seems to care.

KELSI SHEREN

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SOURCE: https://righttolife.org.uk/news/canadian-woman-getting-assisted-death-because-she-cant-get-surgery

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Ontario’s chief coroner has now confirmed, in expert reports released alongside that AP probe, that some non-terminal MAiD deaths in the province were driven by “unmet social needs” such as fear of homelessness or uninhabitable housing.

Canada’s state-assisted suicide program, called MAiD, was sold by the Liberal government as a “stringently limited, carefully monitored system,” a rare option of last resort for people at the very end of life. New data from Health Canada show that in 2024, 16,499 Canadians died by MAiD — 5.1 percent of all deaths in the country.

Does it not follow logically, from these data, that Ottawa’s original framework has, cloaked in the rhetoric of progressively humane ideals, insidiously crept into something far more sinister than what Supreme Court justices, in their wisdom, affirmed in a society-altering Charter of Rights ruling in 2015?

Prior analysis from Cardus, a Canadian faith-based think tank, documented exponential increases from 1,018 deaths in 2016 to 13,241 in 2022 — about a thirteenfold rise — and notes that MAiD has become Canada’s fifth leading cause of death, roughly tied with cerebrovascular disease and behind cancer, heart disease, and accidents.

Under current federal law, eligibility for MAiD is scheduled to expand again in 2027, when people whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness can join the program. A joint House of Commons–Senate committee has recommended extending MAiD to “mature minors.”

Hold on, though. Roughly one in twenty deaths in Canada is now attributed to MAiD. On those numbers alone, rather than moving ahead with this expansion agenda, an external human-rights review should come first — and it should test whether Canada’s existing system is already breaching the rights of disabled, poor and socially isolated people before any further gates are opened.

In a statement this week citing its own prior research, Cardus, a faith-based think tank, added that Health Canada’s own data underlines a massive expansion beyond the “stringently limited, carefully monitored system” of last resort cited by the Supreme Court in 2015.

“Almost 58 percent of Track 1 MAiD recipients and more than 63 percent of Track 2 recipients reported ‘emotional distress/anxiety/fear/existential suffering’ in 2024, a significant jump from around 39 percent and 35 percent respectively in 2023,” Cardus wrote. “Meanwhile, almost half of those who died by MAiD in 2024 reported feeling like a burden on family, friends, or caregivers, maintaining the alarmingly high levels of previous years.”

Canada’s share of deaths from assisted dying is now among the highest in the world.

That is not what Canadians were told to expect when politicians and medical bodies insisted assisted death would be reserved for “rare situations” and “last resort” suffering. It is exactly what critics of a rapidly expanding regime warned about.

A new Angus Reid–Cardus survey, reported in the Catholic Register, suggests Canadians see the danger. Sixty-two percent of respondents — including 61 percent of health-care workers — say they are worried that socially or financially vulnerable people will choose MAiD because they cannot get adequate, quality health care. Health professionals admit they are often ill-equipped to meet the needs of people with disabilities, and nearly half say disabled patients receive “poor or terrible” care in our system.

But even stark data do not tell the whole story.

Recall that in late 2022, Veterans Affairs Minister Lawrence MacAulay acknowledged that a number of Canadian military veterans were casually offered the option of medically assisted death by a now-suspended caseworker. Those veterans were calling their own government for help living with post-traumatic stress, brain injuries and the scars of service. Instead, they were encouraged to explore dying.

An Associated Press investigation in 2024, drawing on private forums used by Canadian doctors and nurses, documented cases where MAiD was approved for people whose primary suffering was homelessness, social isolation or poverty: a homeless man who refused long-term care, a woman with severe obesity, an injured worker living on meagre benefits, grieving widows. Clinicians privately debated whether they were being asked to solve social abandonment with a lethal injection.

Ontario’s chief coroner has now confirmed, in expert reports released alongside that AP probe, that some non-terminal MAiD deaths in the province were driven by “unmet social needs” such as fear of homelessness or uninhabitable housing.

The coroner’s committee estimated that around 2 percent of cases they reviewed may not have followed all legally required safeguards — but no prosecutions have followed. Many of those euthanized came from the poorest parts of the province.

In December 2024, the Catholic Register reported on an Angus Reid–Cardus survey finding that many people with severe disabilities have experienced discrimination and poor care in the health system, while support for ever-broader MAiD access keeps rising. Cardus’s Rebecca Vachon warned that euthanasia is “crippling health-care resources and eroding the doctor-patient relationship.”

More recently, the same magazine highlighted doctors’ concerns about Health Canada messaging that encourages clinicians to raise MAiD discussions earlier with patients as part of “advance care planning.” Physicians interviewed said vulnerable patients already feel “pestered” about MAiD — and worry that a legal obligation to present all options is sliding into a cultural expectation to offer death.

Meanwhile, disability advocates have taken Canada’s MAiD regime directly to the United Nations. In March 2025, Inclusion Canada and allied groups appeared in Geneva before the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, warning that Canada may be breaching its obligations under international disability rights law by offering assisted death to people whose suffering is driven by poverty, lack of care and discrimination.

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