A new report from Health Canada confirms that more than 60,000 lives have been lost to “medical assistance in dying” in Canada between 2016 and 2022. Euthanasia was supposed be the exception to the rule, but Canada has become a case study in how euthanasia is virtually impossible to confine once legalized.

Euthanasia in Canada was initially envisioned as an option only for competent adults nearing death who ask for their lives to be ended. A few years later, the requirement that death must be reasonably foreseeable disappeared from the law.