Eric Edmeades thought his father had months left before Canada’s medical assistance in dying program would run its course. Instead, the process collapsed into days, and his father Baz, in his late 70s, was dead before the family could fully prepare.
Edmeades, founder of the speaker-training platform Speaker Nation, told Fox News Digital that his father began discussing Canada’s MAiD program after his health deteriorated in late 2023. By January, the family was taking the request seriously, but projections put the timeline at six months or more. Edmeades and his wife flew to Vancouver at the start of 2024 to see his father while the decision still seemed far off.
Then it wasn’t.
“And then all of a sudden it was like, ‘No, it’s next week,'” Edmeades said.
Baz Edmeades died by MAiD on Feb. 27, 2024. His son said he wasn’t in contact with the medical providers handling the case and didn’t understand the full picture until after his father was gone.
“It happened so quickly that I only really started to piece together what happened when it was done,” he said.
A Decline That Started With Lockdowns
Edmeades said his father had been “incredibly healthy most of his life” but suffered from epilepsy and neurological pain. COVID-era lockdowns, which kept him from walking outside, accelerated his physical decline, his son said.
“There just came this point where life started sounding pointless to him,” Edmeades said.
Edmeades also raised questions about whether interactions between his father’s medications may have worsened his condition. His father had talked about suicide before, which made the initial interest in MAiD less shocking to the family — but Edmeades said that history should have mattered more, not less, once the request moved forward.
Other relatives pushed back. Edmeades said his brother openly opposed the decision, and a close friend of his father’s spent roughly 45 minutes trying to talk him out of it in his final days.
“At that stage, you know, for him, the decision was made,” Edmeades said.
“Way Past Appropriate”
Edmeades said he doesn’t reject the idea that assisted dying could be appropriate in some circumstances. He does reject what Canada has built.
“What I see happening in Canada is way past appropriate,” he said.
He wants eligibility decisions walled off entirely from government, warning that any financial stake the state has in the outcome creates a dangerous incentive.
“It should only ever exist if, and I mean if the process for approving people, it would be completely independent of government, and there could be no benefit to those people in making that preference in making that decision. Because otherwise there’s a slippery slope, and we see that slippery slope,” Edmeades said.
The System’s Scale
Canada legalized euthanasia under MAiD in 2016. The BBC reports it now accounts for one in every 20 deaths in the country. Under federal rules, applicants must be at least 18, capable of making medical decisions, eligible for publicly funded health care, and acting voluntarily and with informed consent. They must have a serious, incurable illness, disease or disability, be in an advanced and irreversible decline, and face suffering they consider intolerable.
A report from the Canadian Medical Association Journal, covered by EWTN News, found that assisted suicide could save Canada’s health system between $34.7 million and $136.8 million a year — while noting that cost shouldn’t factor into individual decisions.
On Oct. 27, 2026, the federal government introduced legislation, Bill C-41, the proposed Medical Assistance in Dying Safeguards Act, that would allow advance requests for MAiD while blocking a planned expansion to people whose sole condition is mental illness.
Ottawa’s Response
Ian McLeod, senior media relations advisor for Canada’s Department of Justice, told Fox News Digital that the law sets strict conditions.
“Canadian law is extremely clear: medical assistance in dying (MAID) requires a voluntary request, freedom from external pressure, and the person’s informed consent, among other stringent eligibility criteria and safeguards. Knowingly failing to comply with these eligibility criteria and safeguards is a criminal offence,” McLeod said.
McLeod said Bill C-41 reinforces that mental illness alone cannot be the basis for MAiD eligibility, even though it may contribute to a person’s suffering. Patients whose natural death isn’t reasonably foreseeable must be assessed by two independent doctors or nurse practitioners, with at least 90 days between the first assessment and the assisted death — though that window can be shortened if both assessors agree the patient risks losing the capacity to consent.
McLeod noted the federal rules are a floor, not a ceiling, and that provinces and territories control how MAiD is actually administered on the ground — meaning oversight questions ultimately land with provincial authorities, not Ottawa.
