After Parliament legalized assisted suicide in 2016, 2,838 Canadians killed themselves with the help of doctors the following year. By 2024, that number had risen almost six-fold to 16,499.
Assisted suicide (euphemistically mischaracterized as medical assistance in dying, or MAID) is now the fourth-largest cause of death in Canada, accounting for 5.1 percent of Canadian deaths in 2024, and a shocking 7.9 percent of deaths in Quebec. After the Netherlands, Canada comes in second place as the global leader in assisted suicide, even dwarfing ever-progressive Belgium, where assisted suicide was responsible for 3.6 percent of deaths in 2024.
