https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/compliance-problems-maid-canada-leaked-documents

https://archive.is/CENNM

For years, there have been clear signals that euthanasia providers in Canada may be breaking the law and getting away with it. That is the finding of the officials who are responsible for monitoring euthanasia deaths to ensure compliance in the province of Ontario. Newly uncovered reports reveal that these authorities have thus far counted over 400 apparent violations — and have kept this information from the public and not pursued a single criminal charge, even against repeat violators and “blatant” offenders.

In Canada, medical assistance in dying, or MAID, is regulated by criminal law. Practitioners must comply with federal and provincial criteria or face lengthy prison sentences. Among other requirements, they must carefully assess whether people who request euthanasia are eligible, uphold all the safeguards against abuse, and report each request and each death.

Euthanasia advocates often tout the strictness of these laws as evidence that the safeguards are working. “Like most clinicians that do this work, I’m acutely aware of what happens … if I break the rules anywhere,” says Stefanie Green, a former president of the leading organization of Canadian euthanasia practitioners, on a podcast. “There’s criminal liability sitting in the back of my head, blaring out loud and neon signs: 14 years in jail.”

In Ontario, the responsibility for lighting up those neon signs falls to the Office of the Chief Coroner. Since 2014, that office’s head has been Dirk Huyer, who has publicly boasted that “Every case is reported. Everybody has scrutiny on all of these cases. From an oversight point of view, trying to understand when it happens and how it happens, we’re probably the most robust in Canada.”

But private documents reveal a different side of the story.

From 2018 to 2024, in presentations held behind closed doors and in reports that were nominally public but garnered little attention, Huyer has shown that his office has identified hundreds of “issues with compliance” with the criminal law and regulatory policies. In 2023, his office raised these concerns for a quarter of all euthanasia providers in Ontario.

Most of the information in these documents, which were shared with The New Atlantis by three physicians who had access to them on condition of anonymity, is being newly made public or reported on for the first time in this article.

After more than four hundred identified issues with compliance, ranging from broken safeguards to patients who were euthanized who may not have been capable of consent, Huyer’s office has failed to alert the public or take any steps to prosecute offenders. Whether or not these hundreds of “issues” are in fact violations of criminal law is unclear precisely because none of them have been referred to law enforcement for investigation. Instead, Huyer’s office has deemed virtually all of them as requiring nothing more than an “informal conversation” with the practitioner or an “educational” or “notice” email. Even in one egregious case, in which the practitioner was found to have violated multiple legal requirements, and which Huyer himself described as “just horrible,” his office reported the case only to a regulatory body instead of the police.

Oversight of euthanasia is meant to be “protecting vulnerable people from abuse and error,” according to the Supreme Court of Canada. Instead it is protecting euthanasia providers from their abuse and error coming to light.