Canada's 16,499 MAID Deaths in 2024 Exceeded Deaths From Stroke, Lung Disease and Diabetes

A comparison of federal data puts the scale of medical assistance in dying (MAID) in Canada in sharper relief. In 2024, 16,499 Canadians received MAID, according to Health Canada. That is more than the number who died from any single cause on Statistics Canada's list below the top three.

The comparison comes from an Epoch Times analysis by James Yang, which lined up the MAID total against Statistics Canada's 2024 cause-of-death counts.

The numbers

Statistics Canada's three leading causes of death in 2024 were cancer, heart disease and accidents.

• Cancer: 85,589 deaths
• Heart disease: 57,982 deaths
• Accidents: 20,415 deaths
• MAID: 16,499 deaths
• Cerebrovascular diseases: 13,680 deaths
• Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 13,202 deaths
• Influenza and pneumonia: 7,658 deaths
• Diabetes: 6,874 deaths
• Alzheimer's disease: 5,294 deaths

That is the basis for the claim that MAID would rank fourth if it were counted on its own, behind only cancer, heart disease and accidents.

Why the ranking is not official

Statistics Canada does not treat MAID as a separate cause of death. Deaths involving MAID are counted under the medical conditions that led people to seek assisted dying, such as cancer or neurological diseases.

So MAID deaths are already included in the totals for other causes. The figures cannot be added together, and MAID's fourth-place ranking is not an official classification.

MAID and life expectancy

MAID also inevitably affects Canada's life expectancy statistics, because it brings about deaths earlier than they would otherwise occur. It is hard to estimate how big that impact might be.

A comparison of provincial life expectancy and the median age of MAID recipients, drawn from Statistics Canada and Health Canada figures, shows that people who received MAID were generally younger than the average life expectancy in their province. The gaps were:

• Quebec, New Brunswick and Alberta: five years below provincial life expectancy
• Ontario: three years
• British Columbia: two years

Those gaps do not show how large the effect on life expectancy is. To find out, researchers would need to estimate how much longer MAID recipients would have lived without assisted dying.

Policy backdrop

Last month, the federal government tabled legislation to indefinitely exclude people whose sole medical condition is a mental illness from receiving MAID. The government is also expanding MAID by allowing advance requests from people with serious illnesses who may lose the capacity to consent in the future.

The accounting issue

Because MAID deaths are folded into other causes, Canada's published cause-of-death rankings do not show how many people died by this route. The comparison is a way of showing scale; it does not change how Statistics Canada reports mortality.