When the Canadian Parliament expanded state-sponsored euthanasia in 2021, it carved out a temporary exclusion for cases where mental illness is the sole underlying condition. It set that exclusion to expire on March 17, 2023. Lawmakers then pushed the expiration date to March 17, 2024, and again in 2024 to March 17, 2027, when people whose only diagnosis is psychiatric are now scheduled to become eligible unless the law changes again.
Canada now faces this question through the life of Claire Brosseau, a gifted actress and comedienne with real achievements and real love around her, who also lives with mental illness. She is now suing the Canadian government for the legal right to have a doctor end her life.
As such, this is not a debate about freedom. It is a debate about whether a nation will protect the suicidal or assist them in their own killing. Claire’s suffering is real and deserves deep respect and care. It does not deserve a lethal injection.
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Claire’s story exposes the stakes. For years, she has battled treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, chronic suicidal thoughts, an eating disorder, PTSD, and substance abuse. She has tried medications, therapies, hospital stays, and intensive programs. She has fought to stay alive. Her public success hid a private struggle that often felt unbearable.
Now she has asked for assisted suicide under Canada’s tragically named “Medical Aid in Dying” [MAiD] program. Some present her request as a dignified choice. They say that since the law already allows euthanasia for specific physical conditions, justice requires the same “option” for psychiatric illness.
They speak the language of rights and equality.
What this framing hides is the reality of Claire’s condition and the state’s duty toward her. The language of “choice” treats her request as if it arose from a calm, stable mind weighing equal options. It turns a medical and moral crisis into a legal claim and invites the government to treat her desire for death as just another preference to be respected.
Before Canada agrees to that demand, it must ask a more complex question: what kind of will speaks when despair and illness press on a person day and night?
Mental illness attacks judgment. Severe depression narrows a person’s vision until death seems like the only rational step. Chronic suicidal ideation whispers that everyone would be better off without you. Those thoughts are symptoms of the disease, not explicit expressions of freedom.
To build a system that agrees with those thoughts and then carries them out does not honor autonomy. It betrays a sick person at her weakest point.
Canada already recognizes this in every other context. When police find someone preparing to jump from a bridge, they pull that person back. When a patient in a hospital tries to harm himself, the staff intervenes. Families rush to stop overdoses and call ambulances. We act because we know that a person in crisis does not see life accurately. Our duty lies in protection, not in cooperation with self-destruction.
Extending assisted suicide to mental illness would erase that duty in law. It would tell people like Claire, “Your wish to die makes sense, and we will help you.”
The medical facts deepen the concern. Psychiatrists often disagree about prognosis. Some declare a case “irremediable.” Others with equal training hold out hope for recovery or improvement. Claire’s own doctors differ sharply. When experts cannot agree about whether an illness truly has no path forward, the state cannot honestly claim that death is a responsible response.
The wider system adds another layer.
Canada’s mental health services already strain under heavy demand. Long waiting lists and limited resources leave many people without consistent, long-term care. In such a setting, euthanasia offers a quick and inexpensive way to close a file. The people most likely to receive that “solution” are those who stand most alone: patients without a strong family, without advocates, without money, and without social support.
That pressure cuts directly against the equal dignity of persons with mental illness. They do not need equal access to death. They need equal protection of life. A person with cancer and a person with bipolar disorder both deserve every effort to preserve their lives and relieve their pain. The state fails one or both if it replaces care with killing.
A pro-life society refuses to label any life “not worth living.” It recognizes suffering and works to relieve it, but it draws a clear line at killing the sufferer. It sees Claire not as a candidate for state-sponsored euthanasia, but as a woman whose courage deserves more substantial support and whose life still holds meaning.
Canada now stands at a crossroads. It can expand euthanasia and teach its most fragile citizens that death counts as a medical service. Or it can reject that path, strengthen care, and uphold the right to life for every person, including those who struggle with their own minds.
The answer will reveal more than a policy preference. It will reveal what kind of nation Canada chooses to be, and whether people like Claire will meet a system that guards their lives or one that quietly helps them end those lives.
LifeNews.com Note: Raimundo Rojas is the Outreach Director for the National Right to Life Committee. He is a former president of Florida Right to Life and has presented the pro-life message to millions in Spanish-language media outlets. He represents NRLC at the United Nations as an NGO. Rojas was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, Cuba and he and his family escaped to the United States in 1968.
