A Nightmare MAID in Canada

A Canadian man went to a Tim Hortons coffee shop with a minor medical problem, spoke to a doctor, and was promptly taken to a medical facility and euthanized under state-sanctioned MAID policies.

Sadly, this is the most modern Canada story of all time.

A recent report highlights how Canada’s medical assistance in dying program has created exactly the kind of slippery slope conservatives warned about.

According to The Globe and Mail, Dr. James MacLean is being investigated by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario for crossing “professional boundaries” relating to “two 2024 medical assistance in dying cases.”

In one case, the doctor was accused of improperly administering drugs to the patient he was killing. The “patient” began breathing again after being pronounced dead and the doctor had to return to do the procedure again.

The second case was reportedly related to the death of “Thomas Dillon, a 45-year-old Ontario man who had Crohn’s disease.” Dillon also had a history of mental illness and suicidal thinking according to the report.

The physician allegedly evaluated him for MAID eligibility outside a Tim Hortons in London, Ontario.

Months later, after exchanging dozens of text messages they met up again. From The Globe and Mail: “Dr. MacLean met Mr. Dillon at the Tim Hortons and then drove him to a location in London where Mr. Dillon had agreed to have the procedure done, the college’s decision states. Dr. MacLean administered the lethal medications in a room at a holding facility in an industrial unit where cadavers are prepared for transport to funeral homes.”

The story drew widespread commentary on X.

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh condemned the entire Canadian system.

“Horrors beyond comprehension happening just to our north,” he wrote on X. “There’s a much better moral argument for invading Canada and deposing its regime than invading or bombing any country 10 thousand miles away. Industrial scale eugenics and mass murder happening right next door.”

The Ontario incident is being treated as a possible case of malpractice. The investigative committee noted that the “limited regulatory response” to such a case was striking.

But I’d suggest this is simply the kind of abuse that should be expected in a society with industrial scale government-sanctioned assisted suicide. The problem is not a lack of regulatory oversight, it’s that a society has accepted government sponsored euthanasia as just a normal part of medicine.

It’s made all the worse by the fact that Canada has a single-payer health care system where there’s an additional, perverse incentive to get rid of people with chronic problems instead of treating them.

And they are getting rid of people en masse.

What was once a rare occurrence when Canada passed its national MAID law in 2016 has become a leading form of death in the country. More people are killed by MAID than are dogs euthanized at shelters in the country.

By 2024, one in every 20 deaths in the country was by assisted suicide and the total number keeps growing. And many of these deaths were as swift as Dillon’s.

“In Ontario alone, 219 people were killed by the end of the next day following their request for ‘medical assistance in dying’ (MAID) in 2023, according to a 2024 report by an advisory committee,” the Free Press reported in March. “About 30 percent of those deaths occurred on the same day that the person sought the government’s permission to die. The committee hasn’t published comparable numbers since then.”

In June Canada is projected to surpass 100,000 total MAID deaths since the law was pass. As the New York Post noted, this is more than double the number of the country’s World War II deaths.

And just as many warned this “normalized” industry has spun off a series of once unthinkable horrors, including organ harvesting.

The pace and scale of MAID’s implementation is a massive warning to the United States where the issue is at least contested and confined to a minority of states. Even in the cases where assisted death is legal in the U.S. it is still limited. Physicians may give lethal doses of drugs, but they can’t administer them as they do in Canada.

Still, the number of states that allow for this limited assisted suicide is growing. In 2025, New York became the 14th state to legalize it.

The nightmare scenarios unfolding with our “nice” neighbors to the north have given us ample warning of what’s to come if the trend continues.