Alberta is drawing a line. Premier Danielle Smith has officially introduced legislation that would significantly narrow the circumstances under which Canadians in Alberta may access Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), targeting the most contested expansions of the regime: access for children and for those whose sole qualifying condition is a mental illness.

 

“Ultimately this is about protecting vulnerable Albertans.” Premier Danielle Smith

A Rapidly Expanding Regime

 

The urgency behind the legislation is underscored by a startling statistic: over the past four years, MAiD deaths in Alberta increased by 109 percent.

 

Meanwhile, nationally, assisted suicide has become one of the leading causes of death in Canada, a trajectory that demands immediate action.

 

The federal government has been moving to expand MAiD eligibility further, including to those suffering solely from mental illness. Thankfully, Alberta’s government has made clear it views this expansion as a threat to its most vulnerable residents, and it’s using provincial jurisdiction over healthcare delivery to push back.

 

At present, the national picture is sobering.

 

Since Canada legalized MAiD in 2016, back in the days when I worked in Canada’s Parliament, more than 94,000 Canadians have been euthanized. Additionally, there have been 76,475 reported deaths by the end of 2024, with estimates placing the cumulative total at over 94,000 by the close of 2025.

 

Shockingly, the numbers haven’t plateaued, they climbed.

As the numbers grow, so do the ethical questions that refuse to go away:

1. Are the vulnerable truly being protected?
2. Is care being replaced with death?

 

We cannot become numb to figures like these for each individual figure represents a unique human life.

 

Each and every human life carries inherent dignity and immense worth, regardless of circumstance, and Canada deserves a system that affirms life, especially for those who are suffering, rather than one that offers death as a solution.

 

What the Bill Would Do

 

If passed, the Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act would establish desperately needed limitations on assisted suicide in the province.

 

The two headline provisions are a prohibition on MAiD for those under the age of 18, and a prohibition on MAiD when the patient’s sole qualifying condition is mental illness.

 

Beyond those core restrictions, the legislation would also prohibit:

• MAiD for adults who lack healthcare decision-making capacity.
• Referrals for MAiD to providers outside of Alberta.
• Physicians initiating MAiD discussions with patients who have not raised the subject themselves. (This is disturbingly more and more common)
• Public advertising of MAiD, such as posters or bulletins, within healthcare facilities.

 

The bill would also impose specialized training requirements for MAiD assessors and providers in Alberta, aimed at ensuring that eligibility criteria are applied rigorously and consistently.

 

Conscience Protections for Healthcare Professionals and Institutions
Among the bill’s most significant provisions is one that would legally enshrine the right of healthcare professionals and institutions to refuse to provide or accommodate MAiD.

 

For many in the medical community who hold deep moral or religious objections to assisted suicide/euthanasia, this protection has been a long-sought safeguard. The codification of it in provincial law would give that protection teeth.
A Global Inflection Point

 

Alberta’s move doesn’t stand alone.

 

Debates over assisted suicide/euthanasia are intensifying across the world, and the arc isn’t uniformly toward expansion.

 

Just yesterday, Scotland rejected state-backed assisted dying, adding to a picture of ever-growing recognition; from legislatures to the public square, of the immense individual and societal risks the practice carries.

 

If we are looking at the issue holistically, no system of “safeguards” can render assisted suicide/euthanasia truly safe because wherever the practice is legal, human lives are placed at risk, particularly those of people who are suffering, isolated, or dependent on others.

 

Whilst Alberta’s legislation doesn’t abolish MAiD, it does represent a serious and significant attempt to contain it, and to ensure that the most vulnerable are protected from a regime that has grown with alarming speed.

 

The Real Solution: Invest in Hospice and Palliative Care

 

The answer to suffering isn’t death, it’s care.

 

Governments at every level should be directing resources toward robust hospice and palliative care programs that meet patients where they are, manage pain effectively, and surround the dying with dignity, compassion, and human presence.

 

When people ask for death, they’re often asking, at root, for relief from pain, for freedom from feeling like a burden, for assurance that they will not be abandoned.

 

A serious investment in end-of-life care can answer those cries without ending, or dare I say, discarding a life.
Canada spends billions administering a death regime. Those same resources could fund palliative care teams, hospice beds, mental health supports, and disability services. The provision of this kind of infrastructure says to every suffering person: your life is worth fighting for.

 

Death should never be offered as a cost-effective alternative to care. Offering it as such is not compassion but a failure of imagination and of will.

 

Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: A Form of Eugenics

 

Eugenics is commonly associated with the horrors of the twentieth century, but its animating logic, that some lives are less worth living than others, that certain kinds of suffering or disability make existence not worthwhile, is precisely what underpins the expansion of assisted dying/euthanasia.

 

When a state makes death readily available to the mentally ill, the disabled, children, or the elderly poor, it’s not offering freedom; it’s encoding a judgment about whose lives have value.

 

It’s telling the most vulnerable among us, in the clearest possible terms, that ending their lives is a reasonable and even desirable outcome.

 

This isn’t a fringe concern, either.

 

Disability rights advocates, palliative care physicians, and ethicists across the political spectrum have warned that expanded euthanasia programs inevitably exert subtle pressure on those who already feel like burdens; pressure to choose death so as not to inconvenience family, or to relieve the healthcare system of the cost of their care.

 

When society makes death easy and care hard to access, the choice isn’t truly free. The eugenic impulse doesn’t need to be explicit to be real.

 

Protecting the Vulnerable Is Non-Negotiable

 

A society is measured not by how it treats its strongest members, but by how it cares for its weakest.

 

The elderly, the mentally ill, the severely disabled, the vulnerable child, those in poverty, those without family or community support; these are the people who are most exposed when death is made available as an answer to suffering.

 

These are the ones who are least able to resist subtle coercion.

 

These are the ones most likely to internalize the message that their lives are burdens.

 

Each one of these men, women, and children deserve not just legal protections, but a culture and a healthcare system that actively fights for them.

 

Alberta’s legislation is a step toward that culture, but legislation alone isn’t enough. The work of protecting vulnerable people requires investment, vigilance, and a willingness to say that some lives society has been tempted to write off are worth every effort to preserve.

 

No one should feel that dying is their only dignified option. That is the standard a just society must hold itself to.

 

NOTE: The Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act is currently before the Alberta legislature. If passed, it would represent one of the most substantial restrictions on MAiD in Canada since the practice was legalized.

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