The Quiet Expansion of Death: Canada’s MAID Program and the Moral Fatigue of Modern Medicine

I have spent most of my professional life around death. Not theoretical death. Not philosophical death. Real death. I have watched patients die in emergency departments, intensive care units, helicopters, ambulances, and operating rooms. I have watched families collapse emotionally beside ventilators. I have watched physicians sit silently after
losing patients they fought desperately to save. I have also witnessed something equally important: patients survive when nobody expected them to survive. That reality changes the way one looks at medicine. It also changes the way one looks at euthanasia.

Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program began in 2016 under the promise of compassion, restraint, and exceptional circumstances. (1) At the time, many Canadians believed the law would remain limited to terminally ill patients experiencing unbearable suffering near the end of life. Citizens were repeatedly reassured that strict safeguards would prevent abuse and that euthanasia would remain rare.