5.1% and Rising: What MAiD Says About Canada’s Failing Health-Care System

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According to StatsCanada, in Canada, 5.1% of all recorded deaths now come through medical assistance in dying, a number that forces the country to confront a difficult truth: behind every one of those decisions sits a level of pain, despair, or medical exhaustion that the health-care system either could not cure, could not relieve, or could not reach in time.

What makes the figure so important isn’t its size, though it is significant. It’s the signal it sends. A program originally introduced for exceptional, end-of-life cases has gradually become a fixture of the medical landscape. And while Canadians have every right to autonomy, compassion, and dignity, the rise of medically assisted death also exposes another narrative running in the background—one about access, pressure, and the gaps inside a system strained to its limits.

Most people who choose MAiD are dealing with catastrophic illnesses: advanced cancers, degenerative neurological conditions, organ failures that strip away quality of life. But the broader pattern reveals why the conversation cannot be reduced to individual cases. Many Canadians spend months—sometimes years—on wait-lists for specialists. They struggle to find family doctors. They navigate a system where palliative care is uneven, mental-health services are overstretched, and long-term care options vary dramatically in quality. When someone decides their suffering is unbearable, that decision might feel deeply personal, but it also reflects the ecosystem around them. The availability of support, the timeliness of treatment, and the dignity of care all shape whether someone feels they have options left.

That is the uncomfortable question behind the 5.1%: Are people choosing MAiD because their conditions are untreatable—or because the alternatives are out of reach? When you ask palliative-care physicians, disability advocates, or patients waiting months for diagnostics, the answer isn’t simple. They talk about compassion, yes, but also about fatigue. They talk about independence, but also about a sense of being abandoned by a system that simply cannot keep up. They talk about wanting relief, but also about the fear of becoming a burden.

No one disputes that MAiD provides relief to people experiencing profound suffering. It allows individuals to have agency at the end of life. It spares families the trauma of watching someone they love experience unmanageable pain. But at the same time, the rising reliance on medically assisted dying highlights just how many Canadians feel cornered by disease, by poverty, by disability, or by the sheer inaccessibility of care. A compassionate society has to see both truths at once.

So where do we go from here?

The path forward isn’t to condemn MAiD—it is to strengthen everything that should exist before someone ever reaches that point. That means faster diagnostics, consistent palliative services across provinces, real access to mental-health supports, and a national effort to ensure Canadians do not wait months or years for help that their conditions simply don’t allow them to wait for. It also means confronting the uncomfortable economic reality: suffering is not just physical. Many Canadians face the combined weight of illness and financial insecurity, and that can distort the sense of what choices remain.

If 5.1% of deaths are occurring through MAiD, it shows Canadians are using the system as it was designed—but it also suggests the health-care system they rely on is failing to meet them earlier, more fully, and more humanely. This should not be a conversation about restricting choices. It should be a conversation about expanding support long before the last chapter of someone’s life begins.

Because a society is not judged by whether it allows people to die with dignity. It is judged by whether it gives them enough care, comfort, security, and hope to live with dignity for as long as possible.