The number of medically-assisted deaths in Canada rose by more than 25 per cent in 2019 and made up two per cent of all Canadian deaths last year, Health Canada’s first annual report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada found.

The board of the Irene Thomas Hospice hoped faith alone could stop the onslaught of MAiD at the 10-bed palliative care facility on Vancouver’s southeast edge.

A Quebec court has agreed to allow the federal government to put off making changes to Canada’s medically-assisted suicide law until mid-December.

VANCOUVER -- The Delta Hospice Society is considering appealing a B.C. Supreme Court decision blocking its members from voting to change its constitution in an effort to keep assisted suicide out of the facility.

OTTAWA -- The federal government is now conceding it can’t change the rules around assisted suicide before a court-imposed deadline of July 11.

On the doorstep of what would become the COVID-19 crisis of spring 2020, a wise woman I encountered called me out on the distinction between hope and expectation.

Among the many stories of illness and death wrought by COVID-19 comes the tragic case of Jean Truchon.

In 2006 I was home for about a month recovering from back surgery. It was the first time in my life I was so confined. I was literally staring at all four walls … and what I saw was not pretty.

OTTAWA -- An anti-euthanasia doctors group claims health workers are being “bullied” into providing assisted suicide.

OTTAWA -- The federal government’s request for a four-month extension to comply with a Quebec court ruling that struck down a key element of Canada’s legal suicide regulations has been granted.

In the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that imposed assisted suicide on Canada, the chief justices conceded the need for a “carefully designed system imposing stringent limits” on who would be eligible for a state-sanctioned death.

Two Canadian palliative care hospice centres thousands of kilometres apart are standing firm against pressure to start providing medically-induced deaths at their facilities.

The federal government has introduced new legislation expanding the eligibility criteria for euthanasia. The inaccurate term, medical assistance in dying (MAiD), is currently used to describe what this law would allow, but the process is more accurately called euthanasia or assisted suicide.

VANCOUVER -- Delta Hospice Society president Angelina Ireland is “shocked and outraged” that the B.C. government will pull all funding from the hospice by 2021 because it doesn’t offer assisted suicide.

OTTAWA -- The federal government’s proposed changes to assisted suicide will eliminate the requirement that a person’s death be reasonably foreseeable, but the government will not open up the system to the mentally ill at this time.