Canada’s possible expansion of MAID for mental illness is worrisome, including for high schools

Canada’s federal government is waiting for a special joint parliamentary committee’s recommendations on the issue of MAID expansion to include mental illness.

Justice Minister and Attorney General Sean Fraser told CTV the government awaits the results of committee study before making a decision. The committee is expected to table its report and recommendations before the end of June.

For now, in Canada, legislation exists to extend the temporary exclusion of eligibility to receive medical assistance in dying where a person’s sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness.

In 2027, Canadians 18 years and older with mental illness, such as depression or personality disorders, who are deemed to meet age and other eligibility criteria, could potentially access doctor-assisted death in Canada.

The acts governing public schooling in Ontario and Manitoba allow any student to remain in high school until a maximum age of 21. Disabled students can, and often do, remain in high school between the ages of 18 and 21 for continued learning opportunities.

As researchers whose combined expertise includes inclusive education and disability studies, we are profoundly concerned that this expansion could potentially implicate some high school students and the educators who are tasked with supporting them.

Read more:
As eligibility for MAID expands, the ethical implications of broad access to medically assisted death need a long, hard look

Tansitioning planning to adulthood

In Manitoba, transitioning planning to adulthood begins for students with disabilities at age 14, but specialized day services are only available following age 21. This means for many students under age 21 with disabilities, there is a strong incentive to stay longer in secondary school.

I, Michael Baker, the first author of this article, continue to help disabled students transition from high school to a variety of supports and services, often funded by the provincial government.

These supports and services are stretched, like many public services, leaving significant gaps and shortcomings. This has led to widespread poverty for disabled Canadians.

Manitoba schools are currently engaged in mental health promotion. We worry about a time under these proposed MAID expansion amendments — and amid other discussions about seeking to expand MAID, including via advanced protocols and mature minors — when disabled students could bring their questions, curiosity or even interest about MAID to high school educators, seeking support to end their life.

Recently, 90 disability and mental health organizations from all provinces and territories have called on Parliament to permanently halt the planned expansion of MAID scheduled to take effect on March 17, 2027.

Dehumanizing effects of rhetoric

Some disability advocates and scholars have noted that educational practices and policies continue to maintain a new form of institutionalization for people with disabilities, without the bricks and mortar of a traditional building for the disabled community.

In this way, students with disabilities are set up for future decades of similar exclusion, confinement or marginalization.

Educators come to work every day to make a positive impact in the lives of those they work with, including the lives of students with disabilities, by upholding and advocating for their human rights while pursuing social justice. Yet, we’re now doing this in a context where MAID debates are unfolding amid rising eugenic-ableist rhetoric, which can have powerful dehumanizing effects.

From a disability rights perspective, eugenic-ableist debates infringing on the human rights of people with disabilities are happening in popular culture and also through educational events framed around extending MAID to chronic sufferers.

Read more:
Disability rights are shaped by the narratives embedded in policies like the Accessible Canada Act and MAID

When we hear about how much money MAID could save in health-care spending at the same time as knowing people with disabilities are being presented with the choice to die when not offered support to live, this shapes the possibilities people perceive.

With cases like Sathya Kovac, who said her struggle for home care help led to her decision to die, the expansion of MAID will continue to yield ethically suspect victims. This is chilling in itself and sends worrying messages about which lives we deem worth living.

Parliamentary testimony

In March 2026, the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies published testimonials presented to Parliament’s Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying, related to the potential expansion of MAID that reject an arguably “discriminatory expansion of MAID law and the regime it authorizes.”

The testimony provided should lead every Canadian to be concerned about the current proposed MAID expansion, and what potentially comes next.

As a country, Canada can provide adequate supports to ensure a good life for persons with disabilities and those with mental illness.

We can choose to provide adequate funding and access to meaningful and comprehensive services for people with disabilities, including community placements, supportive educational options and employment infrastructure for young people leaving high school, as well as comprehensive palliative care for those at the end of life and their families.

MAID should never be seen as the solution to address the absence of those services and resources, but as Ontario’s Chief Coroner’s report has documented, it has become that for some people, and that is our collective failure as the people of Canada.

MAID deaths now account for 5.1 per cent of all deaths in Canada, with a total of 16,499 deaths reported by Health Canada’s latest Annual Report, with Québec having the highest rate of assisted dying in the world, with 7.9 per cent of all deaths occurring through the procedure.

We fear this proposed MAID expansion will further erode our schools’ abilities to adequately support all students.