A newly released Order Paper response shows 15 federal inmates have died by medical assistance in dying (MAID) since legalization, with requests climbing to their highest level ever in 2024 and 2025.

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Here’s the timeline detailed in the response to the query posed by Conservative MP Garnett Genuis: 

• 2016–2017: 0 MAID deaths

• 2018: 2 deaths

• 2019–2021: 1 death per year

• 2022: 4 deaths

• 2023: 1 death

• 2024: 4 deaths

• 2025: 1 death by September

Requests ballooned from 2 in 2017 to 15 in 2024, and 12 more already this year.

Ottawa insists this isn’t a form of execution, but the ethical line is now razor-thin.

A prisoner can’t choose their doctor, living conditions, or treatment options. “Choice” in a cage isn’t the same as choice in the community. When suffering is state-created, a request to die can’t be treated as purely voluntary.

Of the 15 deaths, 14 were carried out in outside facilities, and one death occurred inside a penitentiary at the inmate’s request. Whether inside or out, it’s still the state coordinating the transfer from custody to death.

Are the MAID deaths disproportionately affecting Indigenous inmates? Women? Black inmates? Visible minorities? The federal government won’t say, citing privacy. Canadians are expected to accept the outcomes without seeing who is affected.

Correctional Service Canada admitted it does not centrally track whether inmates applied for:

• Track 1 MAID (reasonably foreseeable natural death), or

• Track 2 MAID (non–non-end-of-life suffering)

Producing that information would require a manual file review, the department claims, meaning the government itself doesn’t know, or won’t say, whether prisoners are dying because they’re terminal or because they’re hopeless.