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In 2009, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin created a sensation when she claimed that government-run healthcare would inevitably lead to the creation of bureaucratic boards responsible for deciding who should and shouldn’t receive treatment.
It’s from this charge that we got the term “death panel,” which became a near constant reference during the congressional debate over the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Palin was called a loon and a crank.
Even today, a simple search on Microsoft’s Copilot for the date when the former governor coined the term “death panel” carefully notes that her accusation quickly became a viral talking point despite “being widely debunked as a myth.”
Fifteen years after Palin’s remark, disability advocate Krista Carr testified before members of Canada’s parliament, which oversees the country’s healthcare regime, that her organization receives weekly reports of medical assistance in dying, or legalized doctor-assisted suicide, being suggested unprompted to disabled individuals during routine, non-terminal care visits.
Who could have predicted that government-controlled healthcare, combined with legalized euthanasia, would eventually lead to the sick and uncomfortable being told to kill themselves?
Where does Palin go for her apology?
Canada, whose lawmakers, celebrities, and influencers often boast about their “free” healthcare and stringent anti-gun laws, recorded an astonishing 16,499 MAID suicides in 2024, following 22,535 such requests that year.
For reference, Canada reported approximately 15,500 MAID deaths in 2023, resulting in a per capita rate of 37 MAID deaths per 100,000 people. During the same year, the United States recorded around 18,000 gun-related homicides, yielding a per capita rate of 5 gun-related murders per 100,000 people.
Put simply, a Canadian has a greater chance of dying by suicide than an American has of being shot dead.
How’s that for perspective?
Since the practice was legalized nationwide nine years ago, there have been a total of 76,475 reported MAID suicides in Canada. In 2022, the number of Canadians snuffed out by MAID was 13,241; in 2021, it was 10,064; in 2020, the four-year anniversary of legalized suicide in Canada, the number ranged from 7,595 to 7,611. Before that, the count was 5,665, and earlier, it was 4,478. In 2017, Canada reported 2,838 MAID suicides, and in 2016, it recorded an estimated 1,108.
The number of Canadians lining up to commit suicide is increasing each year, and not just a little, but exponentially.
There is a broader conversation to be had about Canada’s evident culture of despair. But the more urgent and troubling issue is the one where, as Palin warned all those years ago, medical professionals within a “universal healthcare” system are evidently encouraging patients to consider assisted suicide, even when the patients themselves have expressed no such desire.
We’re not talking about just one or two cases in Canada since 2016; we’re talking about at least a dozen, and those are only the ones we know about — cases where the victim lived to tell the story.
In 2018, for example, a patient with a degenerative neurological condition at a London, Ontario hospital secretly recorded staff offering him suicide, despite his repeated requests for home care support. In 2022, a paraplegic Paralympian and veteran was offered MAID by a Veterans Affairs Canada caseworker when she requested a wheelchair ramp for her home, with the worker suggesting suicide as an alternative to feeling “desperate.” A separate internal Veterans Affairs investigation confirmed four similar incidents between 2019 and 2022 where the same employee offered suicide to veterans seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder or disabilities, not end-of-life care.
In 2023, a Vancouver woman seeking psychiatric care for chronic suicidal ideation had a clinician describe the MAID process in detail without her prompting, which the patient felt undermined her suicide prevention efforts. In 2019, a man in British Columbia was approved for MAID amid family concerns that it had been suggested while he was vulnerable in the hospital for suicidal ideation. In 2024, a Montreal woman with spina bifida was offered MAID twice by hospital staff during unrelated treatment, and a woman from Nova Scotia was asked about MAID before breast cancer surgery despite not being terminally ill.
Another disabled woman was suggested MAID by her physiotherapist while seeking help for a bruised hip.
If you think this is bad, know it will get much worse, especially as Canada prepares to broaden its already generous MAID qualification criteria in 2027 to include people with mental health problems. This is in addition to separate proposals to make MAID suicide services available to “mature minors,” that is, patients under the age of 18 who are “found to have the requisite decision-making capacity,” as well as infants under one year old in cases of “severe deformities.”
Even without the proposed expansions, we know that things will get worse in Canada because we know what happens in modern societies where secular understandings of convenience and quality of life inform medical and lifestyle decisions. Just look at what Europe did to children with Down syndrome — it aborted them into near-extinction.
With the introduction of more precise prenatal testing, significantly fewer babies with Down syndrome are being born in Europe, as most parents choose abortion after a positive diagnosis. Between 2011 and 2015, elective abortions cut the number of live births with Down syndrome by an average of 54% across the continent, meaning about half as many babies were born as would have been without testing and abortion. The most significant decline was in Southern Europe (71%), followed by Northern Europe (51%) and Eastern Europe (38%). In countries such as Iceland and Denmark, nearly 100% of pregnancies diagnosed with Down syndrome end in abortion, so only a small number of babies with the condition, if any, are born each year (often just zero to 3 in Iceland).
If an entire continent’s worth of parents are willing to sacrifice their children in the name of convenience and quality of life, what do you suppose a culturally adjacent, secular government will do when the similarly “inconvenient” become a drain on its already overburdened healthcare system? It’s the most predictable thing in the world that Canada and others would move toward suicide recommendations.
Remember, Canada is a country that, until relatively recently, had fewer MRI machines than Pittsburgh. It’s also a country with a median healthcare wait time of an astonishing 28.6 weeks. Why wouldn’t Canada try to ease the pressure on its healthcare system by encouraging the chronically ill, the elderly, and the mentally unstable to commit suicide? If a government is seeking a way to manage an already unwieldy budget, it might naturally consider removing those who contribute little but consume a great deal — the crippled, the infirm, the feeble, and the mentally impaired.
It has always seemed odd that Palin’s warning was met with ridicule and mockery, dismissed as complete lunacy, the suggestion that a board overseen by nameless bureaucrats would eventually invent for itself the power to decide who should and should not have access to government-run medical care.
Governments operate on a limited resource: money. What do all businesses do when an asset incurs more debits than credits? They cut that asset. Governments are no different. In a utilitarian sense, it’s only logical that Canada is pushing for the liquidation of those whose mere existence is a drain on the treasury; it would be surprising if it weren’t.
This will be the fate of all such countries with government-run healthcare. Necessity will ultimately force severe cost-cutting measures, and those implementing the courts will eventually stop caring about whether they affect an item or a person.
The cuts will start as subtle hints, then become straightforward suggestions, then cajoling, until they finally become harassment. Eventually, we will reach the final stage, where it is no longer a suggestion but a government mandate that you be removed from the community. See: The United Kingdom and the fate of the child Charlie Gard.
Sounds fantastical, right? Tell that to Gard. Tell that to the Canadians whose healthcare professionals keep telling them to kill themselves.
IN FOCUS: THE GOOD NEWS ABOUT THE RIGHT’S CIVIL WAR
Canadian lawmakers often brag about their anti-gun initiatives, with leaders from former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Public Safety Minister Bill Blair stating that so-called red flag laws are necessary to lower the number of gun-related suicides.
With 2025 expected to surpass last year’s record-breaking MAID numbers, it’s safe to say that Canadian authorities don’t object so much to dead Canadians as they object to not being the ones to pull the trigger.
T. Becket Adams is a journalist and media critic in Washington, D.C.
