Who Benefits and Why is The Truth Being Hidden?

By Donald Best

The government system to euthanize Canadians is running into problems with the language of killing.

From Newfoundland to Alberta, physicians are instructed to erase the state’s role in nearly 100,000 MAiD killings. British Columbia alone tells the truth. The question is why everyone else has chosen not to.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario has instructed physicians completing death certificates for patients who die by Medical Assistance in Dying:

“The illness, disease or disability leading to the request for MAID is to be recorded as the cause of death.”

“The certificate cannot include any reference to MAID or the medications administered.”

The College calls them “medications.” They are, in practice, a sequence of unregulated injections—typically a sedative to render the patient unconscious, a paralytic agent to stop the lungs, and a drug to arrest the heart. The specific substances, quantities, and combinations are left entirely to the provider. When protocols produce inconsistent outcomes and documented failures, there is another word for that. Experimental.

That killing procedure is what the death certificate is forbidden to mention. What it must record instead is the disease—the cancer, the disability, the depression—that led the patient to ask for death in the first place. But again, how is depression a cause of death? How is disability? How is blindness?

Canada practices euthanasia, not “assisted suicide.” This distinguishes Canada from every American jurisdiction where assisted dying is legal. In Oregon, California, and the other states that permit it, the person must self-administer: drinking the prescribed substance, pushing the button—initiating the act themselves. The state provides the means. The individual initiates the act. Canada rejected that distinction entirely. Here, the physician administers the injections directly. The state does the killing.

What Canada calls MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) is, by any clinical and legal definition, euthanasia—a word the Canadian government has carefully avoided.

The state administers those injections. The physician is ordered to lie, recording the underlying illness instead of the fatal injections. The true cause of death vanishes from the official record. The government’s role in the death is erased from the legal certification of how a Canadian died.

Health Canada’s most recent annual report confirms 76,475 Canadians died by MAiD between legalization in 2016 and the end of 2024. That figure, already one in every twenty deaths in this country, covers only through December 31, 2024. Projections from the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, tracking provincial data through 2025, place the cumulative total at approximately 90,000. By any reasonable arithmetic, Canada is approaching 100,000 MAiD killings. Outside British Columbia, the policies governing death certificates in every province and territory that has one forbid the truth from appearing on the document.

But how can “depression,” or “blindness,” or “poverty” be considered a valid cause of death?

Ontario is the most explicit about this, but it is far from alone. Quebec’s official guidance states in plain language: “Medical assistance in dying is not a cause of death. The illness or incapacity that led to the request must be entered.” Manitoba requires the same outcome without saying so directly. Nova Scotia certifies MAiD deaths as natural deaths, with no mention of MAiD anywhere in its physician guidelines. New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador, and PEI have published no clear rule at all, which means no accountability and no consistency for what gets written on the certificate.

This is built into Canada’s federal reporting framework, which follows the World Health Organization’s classification system. The WHO does not classify MAiD as a cause of death, and Canada has adopted that position wholesale.

One province does it differently. British Columbia instructs physicians to record MAiD explicitly on the death certificate, with the underlying illness also noted and the manner of death listed as natural. British Columbia’s approach shows that the alternative exists, is workable, and that every other province has actively chosen not to use it.

Money Matters

In 2020, Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer calculated that MAiD saves federal and provincial governments more than $149 million annually. They know exactly how much each death is worth to the treasury.

Disability support in New Brunswick pays only $705 a month. Seventy percent of Canadians who need palliative care cannot access it. Approval for MAiD moves faster than a referral to a specialist.

Ask yourself who that system was designed to serve. Ask yourself about the economics of encouraging death.

Christine Gauthier is a decorated Canadian veteran. Her on-duty military injuries left her in a wheelchair. She competed for Canada at the 2016 Paralympics in Rio. In 2022, she testified before a Parliamentary committee that a Veterans Affairs caseworker offered her MAiD in writing—after she applied for a wheelchair ramp for her home:

“I have a letter saying that if you’re so desperate, madam, we can offer you MAiD. I can’t believe you will give me an injection to help me die, but you will not give me the tools I need to help me live.”

Had Gauthier accepted the offered euthanasia, her death certificate would have recorded one word: “Disability.” Nothing about the denial of funding for a ramp. Nothing about the letter offering death. Nothing about the injections that would have killed her.

Canada also permits organ harvesting from MAiD patients. The practice is legal, growing and profitable.

The same state and medical industry that knows exactly how much each death saves the treasury also benefits from the sale of body organs. The death certificate records neither the injections nor what followed them.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer put a number on the savings of each death. The same office has never calculated the profit on the sale of the organs—or at least never released that information to Canadians.

“Non-Consensual Killings”

Ontario’s chief coroner flagged 428 compliance issues by 2024: broken safeguards, missing documentation, and potentially non-consensual killings. A quarter of all Ontario MAiD providers received at least one compliance flag in 2023. Not one was reported to police.

The falsified death certificate is not a separate problem from the criminal conduct. It is the mechanism that makes the criminal conduct invisible. No injections on the record means no crime on the record.

Consider “Mrs. B.” in Ontario. She was elderly, in her eighties. She told her assessors she wanted palliative care. She cited her faith and withdrew her consent for MAiD. The one clinician who wanted to re-interview her before the killing procedure was refused access. That evening, Mrs. B was killed.

Her death certificate records her illness, not her withdrawal of consent. Not the locked door, not the injections that killed her. And certainly not the desperation and pleas of an old woman who changed her mind about being killed.

In 2027, MAiD expands to mental illness. The system that killed Mrs. B without her consent is about to be handed a category with no defined limits and no reliable way to establish consent at all.

Under the Criminal Code, MAiD providers are exempt from homicide charges only if consent requirements are met. Mrs. B withdrew her consent. The exemption did not apply. The Criminal Code has another word for what was done to her…

Murder.

Key sources:

• Health Canada, Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying 2024: canada.ca
• Euthanasia Prevention Coalition / Catholic Register, fall 2025: catholicregister.org
• CPSO guidance on death certificates — cpso.on.ca
• Quebec MSSS guidance — publications.msss.gouv.qc.ca
• BC Vital Statistics death certificate handbook, pp. 11–12 — gov.bc.ca
• Parliamentary Budget Officer, 2020 — pbo-dpb.gc.ca
• Christine Gauthier, testimony before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs, 2022 openparliament.ca/committees/veterans-affairs/44-1/29/christine-gauthier-20/only/
• Alexander Raikin, The Hub / EPPC, November 18, 2024 — eppc.org
• Ontario MAID Death Review Committee Report, 2024 (Mrs. B case) ocswssw.org/wp-content/uploads/MAiD-Death-Review-Committee-Report-2024.pdf

Donald Best is a former Toronto Police Sergeant (Detective), Investigative Journalist, Sole Recipient of the 2018 Ontario Civil Liberties Award, and Director at GrusJusticeProject.org