Is This Really Mercy?

Leave a CommentIs This Really Mercy?Commentary

The boast traveling the wires is simple and ugly. More people were put to death by doctors in Canada last year than were shot to death in the United States. An old woman in an Ontario home cried and said she had made a mistake. Now the same project is being talked about for children.

Two of those sentences need a scale. The third needs a name and a date. The fourth is not yet the law. Start with the numbers, because the numbers are the only thing that will sit still.

What the count actually says

In 2024, the last year Ottawa has closed the books, 16,499 people in Canada received a medically assisted death. That was 5.1 percent of every death in the country, a little more than one in twenty. The year before it was 15,427. Growth has slowed from the thirty-percent leaps of the early years to 6.9 percent. Slowing is not shrinking. The pile since legalization in 2016 stands at 76,475.

In the United States, in that same year, 44,447 people died by firearm. Most of those were suicides: 27,593. Firearm homicides were 15,364. Provisional figures for 2025 put total American gun deaths lower still, around 42,300, with homicides down again to about 12,850 and gun suicides at a new high above 28,000.

So the viral comparison is true only if “gun violence” is made to mean homicide and homicide alone. Sixteen thousand Canadian assisted deaths did outrun fifteen thousand American gun murders in 2024. They did not outrun American gun deaths as a whole. They did not outrun American gun suicides. Anyone who flattens those three piles into one slogan is selling you a headline, not a ledger.

The honest shock is still sitting on the table. Canada has about 41 million people. The United States has more than eight times that. A country the size of California is now recording more state-administered deaths in a year than the entire American republic records in gun homicides. Quebec’s share of all deaths by this route has run even higher than the national figure. That is not a rounding error. That is a system that found a customer.

Nearly 96 percent of the 2024 cases were people whose natural death was judged reasonably foreseeable. The rest, 732 people, were on the second track opened in 2021: grievous suffering, death not near. Seven hundred eighty-five people that year were killed under a waiver of final consent, the arrangement that lets the needle go in after the patient can no longer say yes. Four thousand and seventeen who had asked for the procedure died of something else first. Six hundred ninety-two changed their minds and withdrew.

The woman who cried

Brigitte Stegemann was 83. Her family called her GG. She died on the morning of July 10, 2026, at a small long-term care home in Cannifton, outside Belleville, Ontario. She had late-stage stomach cancer. She was a Christian who, her granddaughter says, had already refused the procedure because she did not want to displease God.

The granddaughter, who held power of attorney and had been the old woman’s caregiver for years, says the home started the assessments while she was away. She says a cognitive test went badly. She says that two days before the appointment she asked her grandmother, in plain words, whether she understood she would die on Friday. She says the old woman cried for a long time and said she had made a mistake.

On the morning itself, the family describes a botched line, blood on the gown and the sheets, a nurse without gloves, and no clear spoken yes when the doctor asked if she agreed to the medicine. Her hands, they say, were folded as if in prayer.

That is the family’s account. It is not a verdict. As of this month the local police criminal division has confirmed it is looking at the death. Complaints are also sitting with the provincial coroner, the long-term care ministry, and the patient ombudsman. No public finding has been issued. A country that puts more than sixteen thousand people a year through this process will produce cases that look like this. The question is how many never get a granddaughter with a binder.

Children, and what “next” actually means

The law still says eighteen. No bill on the floor in Ottawa lowers that age. Anyone telling you that twelve-year-olds are about to be scheduled next month is ahead of the statute book.

What is true is uglier in a slower way. In 2023 a special parliamentary committee recommended that eligibility be opened to minors judged to have decision-making capacity, limited to those whose death is reasonably foreseeable. In the hearings, twelve was named as the floor below which capacity is vanishingly unlikely. Quebec’s medical college has talked about fourteen with parental consent. An advocacy shop that exists to widen the practice has said out loud that it wants twelve-to-fifteen-year-olds in, with a parent’s signature.

That is how this project moves. First the dying. Then the suffering who are not dying. Then the waiver when the patient can no longer speak. Then the advance request, which Quebec is already taking even though the federal criminal code still forbids it and Ottawa has chosen not to pick that fight. Mental illness as the sole condition was supposed to arrive in 2023, then 2024, then March 17, 2027. A committee this June told the government to kill that expansion for good. The new cabinet has signaled it may follow. It still has to pass a bill. Until it does, the clock runs.

Alberta has moved the other way, trying to shut the second track and bar minors inside its own borders. That fight will go to court. It always does. Every expansion in this file began as a recommendation that serious people called modest.

What is likely

The raw count will keep rising even if the growth rate stays in the single digits. A 6.9 percent bump on 16,499 is still more than a thousand additional deaths. Track Two remains a small slice and a large argument. The waiver of final consent is already routine. Quebec’s advance-request registry is filling. The mental-illness door is the one most likely to be barred, or delayed again, because even the psychiatrists who would have to sign the papers asked Parliament to stop.

The child question will not die. It does not have to pass this year to do its work. It only has to stay on the table until a hard case arrives with a dying fifteen-year-old and a camera. That is the method. Find the sympathetic fact. Call the limit cruel. Move the line. Call the next limit cruel.

Compare the two countries without cheating and the picture is plain enough. America has a gun problem that is mostly suicide and a homicide problem that has been falling. Canada built a medical conveyor that now accounts for one death in twenty and is hunting for the next category it is not allowed to touch. The woman in Cannifton may turn out, after the files are opened, to have been a failure of a home and a doctor, or she may turn out to have been the system working as designed. Either answer should freeze the blood. A state that can put the needle in an old woman who just said she made a mistake does not need a new law to find a child. It needs a reason. Reasons, in this business, are cheap.