(LifeSiteNews) — Over 23,000 Canadians have died while on waitlists for medical care as Liberals focused on euthanasia expansions.
According to government figures published on November 26 by Canadian think tank SecondStreet.org, 23,746 patients died on government waiting lists for health care between April 2024 and March 2025.
“What’s really sad is that behind many of these figures are stories of patients suffering during their final years – grandparents who dealt with chronic pain while waiting for hip operations, people leaving children behind as they die waiting for heart operations, so much suffering,” SecondStreet.org President Colin Craig explained.
“It doesn’t have to be this way. If we copied better-performing European public health systems, we could greatly reduce patient suffering,” he continued.
According to the data, collected through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, there has been a three percent increase of deaths while on waitlists compared to last year. The number is likely much higher, as the reports did not include figures from Alberta and some parts of Manitoba.
Data further revealed that 100,876 Canadians have died while waiting for care since 2018, thanks to increased wait times and insufficient staffing.
“It’s interesting that governments will regularly inspect restaurants and report publicly if there’s a minor problem such as a missing paper towel holder,” Craig noted. “Meanwhile, no government reports publicly on patients dying on waiting lists. It’s quite hypocritical.”
At the same time, the Liberal government has worked to expand euthanasia 13-fold since it was legalized, making it the fastest growing euthanasia program in the world. Meanwhile, Health Canada has released a series of studies on advance requests for assisted suicide.
As LifeSiteNews reported earlier this week, so-called “Medical Assistance in Dying” is responsible for more than 5 percent of all deaths in Canada in 2024.
At the same time, internal documents from Ontario doctors in 2024 that revealed Canadians are choosing euthanasia because of poverty and loneliness, not as a result of an alleged terminal illness.
Currently, wait times to receive genuine health care in Canada have increased to an average of 27.7 weeks, leading some Canadians to despair and opt for assisted suicide instead of waiting for medical aid. At the same time, sick and elderly Canadians who have refused to end their lives have reported being called “selfish” by their providers.
In one case, an Ontario doctor revealed that a middle-aged worker, whose ankle and back injuries had left him unable to work, felt that the government’s insufficient support was “leaving (him) with no choice but to pursue” euthanasia.
Other cases included an obese woman who described herself as a “useless body taking up space,” which one doctor argued met the requirements for assisted suicide because obesity is “a medical condition which is indeed grievous and irremediable.”
The most recent reports show that euthanasia is the sixth highest cause of death in Canada. However, it was not listed as such in Statistics Canada’s top 10 leading causes of death from 2019 to 2022.