A Catholic priest says he was offered Canada’s state-sanctioned euthanasia program not once, but twice while recovering from a fractured hip.
The incident is fueling renewed criticism of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program, which has expanded dramatically since it was legalized in 2016. Government figures now put the total number of assisted deaths at roughly 100,000.
Father Larry Holland says a doctor raised the possibility of assisted death shortly after his admission to the hospital, according to reporting from The B.C. Catholic. The option was later discussed again by a nurse. Both medical professionals knew Holland was a priest. The Catholic Church unequivocally rejects euthanasia in all its forms.
Holland said that when he told the doctor he was morally opposed to euthanasia, the doctor said “he just wanted to make sure that, if a [terminal] diagnosis came up or not … I knew of the different services I had access to,” according to the report.
Holland said the nurse seemed uncomfortable talking to him about the MAiD program but likely did so because he was suffering badly. “It’s a false compassion, really,” he said.
Vancouver Coastal Health told The B.C. Catholic that healthcare providers can discuss the MAiD program “based on their clinical judgment.”
As The Daily Wire reported last year, MAiD started back in 2016 for people whose natural death was “reasonably foreseeable” and who wanted to end their lives. Expansion of the program has led to an explosion of state-sanctioned suicides in recent years.
Holland’s experience echoes several other widely reported cases involving MAiD.
Last year, Miriam Lancaster, a British Columbia woman, said she went to a hospital in severe pain and was offered MAiD before doctors had even identified the source of her suffering. It turned out that Lancaster was suffering from a treatable pelvic fracture caused by osteoporosis and fully recovered.
The case of Christine Gauthier, a 52-year-old disabled veteran, sent similar shockwaves about the MAID program. When she requested a wheelchair ramp for her home, Canada’s Veterans Affairs department offered to send her a MAiD kit that would help her to end her own life, The Daily Wire previously reported.
There’s also Roger Foley, an Ontario man with a neurological condition, who says he was offered death-by-MAiD while he was fighting to get proper long-term care.
Not only are adults with hip fractures or disabilities being offered the death “solution,” but prominent groups are calling for minors as young as 12 years old to be included in MAiD. One advocacy group, called “Dying With Dignity Canada,” recommends minors as young as 12 be included in the program, and goes as far as to suggest 16 and 17-year-olds shouldn’t even need parental consent to be killed by a doctor if they fit broad criteria.
“There is a kind of gruesome, relentless logic at work here, and this is why the logical ‘slippery slope’ argument is a valid argument,” Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a psychiatrist and director at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told The Daily Wire at the time. “Once you cross the line of allowing doctors to kill patients, once you cross the line of accepting the basic premise of the euthanasia movement — which is that some lives are not worth living and therefore these people should be killed by the medical profession, then it’s very hard to argue that there should be any limitations.”
Moreover, as the MAiD expansion continues, a recent internal British Columbia government report found 2,807 cases requiring follow-up and 353 compliance concerns in 2024 alone. The findings have raised questions about whether the program’s safeguards are being effectively enforced, particularly given the lack of public information about how many of the flagged cases resulted in corrective action or discipline.
Related: Movement Barrels Forward To Euthanize 12 Year Old Children In Canada
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