In today’s Truth Monster, our friend John Anthony documents how what’s in Canada is already here, and the same folks idolizing killers are OK ending grandma.
Euthanasia in Canada
You may have read of the 83-year-old grandmother murdered under Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program even though she wanted to live.
Here’s a quick synopsis:
Eighty-three-year-old “GG” Stegeman was a nursing home resident diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and considered partially autistic. Her doctors approached her about MAiD, but she and her family rejected suicide as it conflicted with her Christian beliefs. And GG wanted to live. Later, behind the family’s back, and while her granddaughter advocate was away, staff doctors assessed her capacity to make her own decisions, completed the paperwork, and scheduled the MAiD procedure. When the administering doctor told GG, “I’m gonna’ give you your medicine” the autistic woman was silent. Taking silence as assent, he gave her the lethal injection. There is an ongoing investigation.
Full story here.
Despite numerous fail-safe mechanisms none stopped the horrific death of a woman who wanted to die naturally. Nor is this an isolated case. A few months earlier a Canadian man with a minor medical problem discussed his case with an overzealous doctor. He was promptly taken to a medical facility and euthanized under MAiD policies.
Killing grows
According to Health Canada, 16,499 people were euthanized in 2024, an increase of 6.9% over the prior year. MAiD now accounts for 5% of all Canadian deaths.
Normalization
The medical establishment has effectively normalized assisted murder making it more acceptable.
- Provincial health authorities, hospital networks, and professional colleges issuing “care pathways” all treat MAID as a reasonable option.
- In Ontario and Quebec, clinicians report being asked about MAiD at intake or during routine assessments. That’s not the law. They voluntarily made it part of the workflow.
Legislation is what people hear about on the news. It is the daily utilization that normalizes and operationalizes the program.
Incrementalism
Doctor assisted suicide did not appear overnight.
- 2015 - Carter v. Canada: the Supreme Court struck down the criminal prohibition on physician-assisted dying and gave Parliament a year to write legislation. There was no referendum, no public vote. Judges expanded the boundaries of criminal law.
- 2016 - Bill C-14: Parliament responds with “Medical Assistance in Dying.” It was limited to “grievous and irremediable” conditions, and death “reasonably foreseeable.”
No one objected to the narrow use. The widening came in stages sold as “technical fixes”:
- 2019 - Quebec’s Truchon decision struck down the reasonable-foreshadowing requirement. Again, judges made the decision. Government declined to appeal which meant it automatically was in “compliance”.
- 2021 - Bill C-7: Removed the “reasonable foreseeability of natural death” criterion. Created Track 1 (foreseeable death) and Track 2 (not near death but suffering). It excluded mental illness as a sole underlying condition - “for now.” The definition was always intended to be broadened. The exclusion even came with a sunset of 24 months.
- 2024-2025 - Bill C-62: Expanded the sunset to 2027, with a “working group” study in the meantime. The delay isn’t a retreat; it’s just buying time to become politically unnoticed.
The delays are presented as cautions, but they are holding patterns while the category stays in the statute. To be expanded later.
Euthanasia in America
The same is happening in the U.S. at the State and Federal and levels with a sneakier rollout.
The States:
Oregon —
- In 1997 Oregon passed the Death with Dignity Act allowing the terminally ill to end their lives through the voluntary self-administration of doctor prescribed lethal medications.
- The Oregon Health Authority’s 28th annual report shows in 2025, 637 people received lethal-dose prescriptions and 400 reportedly died from ingesting them.
- Since the law passed, 5,520 people got prescriptions and 3,691 died by ingesting. That’s roughly 1% of all Oregon deaths.
- The 2024 report showed an 8% increase, following a 30% spike in 2023.
What the official data ignores about those reports.
They are self-reported by the same physicians and institutions with an interest in the program continuing.
Oregon’s health authority states it “made no referrals to the Oregon Medical Board for failure to comply”.
There is no independent verification that any of these numbers are accurate.
Normalization
Oregon follows the same normalization path as Canada with neutral sounding names like “Death with Dignity”, “Physician-assisted suicide”, and “medical aid in dying”.
There are thousands of deaths in states that legalized the practice, the numbers are climbing, eligibility expanding, and the “official” counts come from institutions with a built-in bias incentive to downplay the numbers.
Other states
- PBS reported 13 states plus D.C. have legalized euthanasia:
- Most recent are Washington, Vermont, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, and New York. More than a dozen others are considering it.
- According to Aging with Dignity’s suicide data, “at least 14,446 Americans have died by physician-assisted suicide since 1997. The report admits the real number is likely much higher.”
Federal
Stealth incrementalism – The Affordable Care ACT
The Affordable Care Act originally contained a provision to pay doctors for advance care planning consultations. People said it called for “death panels”. (The bill called for voluntary, patient-initiated discussions about end-of-life wishes. Pretty innocent stuff. For now.)
- To get the ACA passed, in 2009 congress stripped the advance care planning language.
But it never went away.
- The administration then reintroduced the same Advance Care Planning policy as a Medicare regulation in late 2010 — no vote, no hearing, no floor debate.
What couldn’t be obtained legislatively, the president acquired by executive fiat.
Sleights of hand
Advanced Care Planning slipped into Annual Wellness visits:
- ACA authorized Medicare coverage of an annual wellness visit (Section 4103). But, “the Secretary shall establish a payment for an annual wellness visit”… The bill gave CMS all the authority it needed to reinstate the clause.
CMS reinstates the Advanced Care Planning clause:
- The vehicle was the CY 2011 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule proposed rule, published in the Federal Register on July 13, 2010. CMS proposed that “voluntary advance care planning” be included as an element of the new Annual Wellness Visit, and would be a covered, separately billable service.
Now doctors could get paid for sitting down with patients and discussing end-of-life treatment options, including completing advance directives.
GOP pushes back; it’s reversed:
- The rule took effect January 1, 2011. Within days the WH pulled the advance-care-planning references out of the AWV regulation claiming there was not enough time for public comment. As the Times noted, “it was clear that political concerns” were driving it. The GOP had just taken the House, and a repeal vote was days away.
But, another sleight of hand:
- Voluntary end-of-life planning was already covered as part of the “Welcome to Medicare” visit — the one-time initial physical exam within the first year of enrollment. The 2011 pullback deleted the expansion into the annual wellness visit; it did not eliminate coverage that already existed.
Fully reinstated:
- Five years later, CMS put Advanced Care Planning back in full and stronger. The CY 2016 Physician Fee Schedule final rule made advance care planning a separately payable service reinstated as an “optional element” of the Annual Wellness Visit, now with deductible and coinsurance waived as a preventive service.
CMS’s own document notes the 2010 final rule was “rescinded” — and that the agency had “not [had] an opportunity to consider… the wide range of views on this subject” before issuing it.
CMS conceded that the process was defective the first time around, then made the same policy stick through the fee schedule five years later.
The law nobody wanted became just another rule nobody knew was there.
While there is no federal “death panel” today, there is little to stop that expanded definition. With states increasingly accepting physician assisted suicides, the normalization of the death language, expanding regulations, and a congress more worried about elections than constituents, nothing stops its expansion, except the people.
