Medically assisted deaths (MAID) have increased once again, accounting for nearly one in 20 deaths last year, according to Health Canada’s latest analysis.
The agency released its fifth annual report on MAID in Canada last week, revealing its findings for 2023.
Health Canada received 19,660 requests for MAID in 2023, of which 15,343 were eligible.
The remaining cases involved requests for the procedure that were not fulfilled. This includes 2,906 Canadians who died before receiving it, 915 individuals who were deemed ineligible, and 496 people who withdrew their requests.
The Canadian government defines MAID as a “process that allows someone who is found eligible to be able to receive assistance from a medical practitioner in ending their life.” It is legal in Canada under very specific circumstances and rules. The eligibility criteria can be found here.
According to Health Canada, 4.7% (or about one in 20) of Canadians who died last year received MAID.
While this is a 15.8% increase compared to 2022, the report found that the overall upward trend is slowing down.
“This represents half of the growth rate from previous years: there was a 32.6% increase from 2020 and 2021 and a 31.2% increase from 2021 to 2022,” it reads.
According to the data, 95.9% of MAID cases were people whose death was “reasonably foreseeable,” and only 4.1% were people whose death was “not reasonably foreseeable.”
When it comes to provincial statistics, you can see in the table below that Ontario, Quebec, and BC had the highest number of medically assisted deaths last year.
Health Canada
According to the data, the median age of recipients was 77.6 years old.
“The average age of MAID recipients has been increasing slightly from year to year, from 75.2 in 2019 to 77 in 2022,” reads the report.
Health Canada found that in 2023, slightly more men (51.2%) than women (48.8%) received the process.
However, it notes that more men received it with deaths that were “reasonably foreseeable”(men 51.6% vs. women 48.4%), while more women received it with deaths that were “not reasonably foreseeable” (women 58.5% vs. men 41.5%).
Health Canada notes that because the process is not considered a cause of death by the World Health Organization, the number of medically assisted deaths shouldn’t be compared to cause of death statistics in Canada to assess its prevalence or rank it as a cause of death.
The federal government has delayed eligibility for MAID for people suffering solely from a mental illness to March 17, 2027.
A survey from 2023 found that over half of Canadians have expressed that they don’t support MAID’s expansion for people suffering from “irremediable” underlying mental health illness.