As Canadians blow out the candles on our 159th birthday cake, many will also be heaving a huge sigh of relief.

A special joint parliamentary committee’s report urging the federal government to protect the mentally ill from the nonculpable homicide known as medical aid in dying might be the greatest single gift ever given to Canadians apart from Confederation itself.

Certainly, it should lift the national spirit to know that our inexplicable embrace of the culture of death has at least been breached if not yet broken. Caveat: Whole-hearted shouting huzzahs from the rooftops might be somewhat premature. 

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The House of Commons (effectively meaning the Carney government) must still ratify the special committee’s report through legislative changes, which can happen next fall at the likeliest. Pro-MAiD advocates have already begun a full court press on the media and in political circles. They are obsessed with pressing their patently fatuous, destructively false claim that Canadians can be happy only when everyone has the “right” to die by medical lethal injection. Death’s icy fingers don’t let go lightly.

But the group Physicians for Life (see our Verbatim column on this page) highlights one of the most important victories in the special committee report, namely the debunking of the death cult propaganda that Canadians have had a right to “compassionate” lethal injection conferred on them by the courts.

Nothing in the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2015 Carter decision fabricated such a universal right. While much of Carter was appalling, it only struck down specific Criminal Code provisions against assisting suicide that it found overbroad, and mandated strict conditions under which assisted death was to be deemed legal.

Of course, the ink was not yet dry on the draft legislation converting the Supreme Court’s ruling into criminal law before the death cult lobby was pushing to expand the circle of Hell where suicide is a pretext for homicide. At last, it has met implacable resistance in the legalizing of medical death for those whose illness is mental rather than physical.

The line of this-far-no-further has now held thanks to the special parliamentary committee as well as, it must be said, to the thousands of pro-life lawyers, doctors, health care professionals, academics, clergy, and other Canadians who worked hard to keep the country being swallowed whole by darkness. Their efforts merit lighting a candle. Or many candles.

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The time might be exactly right, then, to enlighten ourselves as a nation to the peril at the other end of the life spectrum, namely our falling birth rate leading us to the cliff edge of population collapse.

Register columnist Andrea Mrozek reports in this issue that Canada has joined the “lowest of the low” countries of the world with a total fertility rate of 1.25 children per woman. We are .85 “children” below what is commonly considered the fertility replacement rate needed just to keep populations stable. It doesn’t take a demographic genius to foresee where that will lead, especially now that the fond panacea of replacement immigration has proven economically, socially and culturally foolish.

Even more troubling in Mrozek’s column are her reported findings from a recent study by think tank Cardus that Canadians actually want to have children/more children but don’t want what’s involved in actually having and raising families.

For women under 35, she writes, life factors such as educational pursuits, personal growth and simply finding the right partner are prohibitive of planning a family. For men, it seems the most significant barrier is the belief that their partners don’t want children. Conclusion? We need to talk.

No one should want giving birth to become a civic obligation. By the Catholic social principle of subsidiarity alone, the birth of a nation must remain a metaphor, not the meaning of life. But that doesn’t mean that “expecting” shouldn’t be an expected as a general development among adults who are biologically and emotionally able. 

In the abstract, there’s the common good benefit. Far more importantly, there’s the well-being of each family – and each family member – that children uniquely bring.

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Or as Mrozek puts it: “I sometimes feel like we make marriage and children into our retirement plan. I’ll do that later, once I finalize a couple more things. This is not quite a recipe for success in a world now concerned and sometimes almost preoccupied with dwindling fertility.”

It truly is better to light a candle than curse the dark. What better time than birthday 159?