An elderly Canadian woman told her doctors she was struggling to stand in the kitchen long enough to cook meals for her family. She wasn't dying. She wasn't in chronic agony. She just couldn't make dinner anymore.
Canada approved her for lethal injection.
The case is one of a growing number of Medical Assistance in Dying approvals that have nothing to do with terminal illness. MAID — Canada's government-run euthanasia program — now accounts for approximately 5% of all deaths in the country. Five percent. That's not a last resort. That's a pillar of the healthcare system.
Dr. Gary Rodin and Dr. Madeline Li, both of the University of Toronto, described MAID as a "dignified last resort, typically for those who are terminally ill." But they acknowledged what the numbers already prove: "Too many people are receiving the procedure without the opportunity for careful reflection." Their own assessment was blunter still — "In some cases, patients are being approved who should not be."
The woman in question wasn't battling cancer. She wasn't in the final stages of organ failure. Her approved reasons included loneliness, poverty, and the inability to fulfill her family role. That's the clinical language for "she felt bad about not cooking Thanksgiving dinner." And Canadian doctor's answer was a syringe.
This is what happens when a government removes guardrails and calls it compassion. In 2021, Canada's Parliament voted to remove the requirement that a patient's death be "reasonably foreseeable" before qualifying for MAID. Read that change carefully: they didn't expand access to the dying. They expanded access to the living.
The woman in this case eventually received counseling from the same Toronto doctors who flagged the problem. "Through counseling, she came to understand that her family valued who she was, not what she did," they reported. "She decided not to go through with ending her life, at least for now." That Christmas, her family gathered and she sat proudly at the table while others did the cooking and serving.
So the system approved a woman for death over a problem that was easily solved by a conversation with her family members. The paperwork was done. The green light was given. If those two doctors hadn't intervened, she'd be dead — not because medicine failed her, but because the bureaucracy moved faster than basic human decency.
The progressive pitch for socialized medicine has always been that the government will take care of you. Canada's version of "taking care of you" now includes a category for people who feel useless at home. Loneliness is on the approved list. Poverty is on the approved list. Not being able to cook is on the approved list.
Americans who push for single-payer like to point north and say we should be more like Canada. The woman who almost died because she couldn't stand at a stove long enough to make her family dinner would probably suggest otherwise.