#Canada #ON – Canada’s most expansive euthanasia regime remained limited to consenting adults on Friday, even as Quebec’s professional college of physicians again described lethal injection as potentially appropriate care for some newborns.
A spokesperson for the Collège des médecins du Québec stated that euthanasia “may be an appropriate treatment for babies suffering from extreme pain that cannot be relieved and who have severe malformations or serious polysymptomatic syndromes that destroy any prospect of survival.” The college added that parents “should have the opportunity to obtain this care for their infant under these well-defined circumstances.”
The wording was not new. The college first put the idea before Parliament in 2021 and 2022, when Dr. Louis Roy told a special joint committee that doctors could consider the option for infants from birth to one year whose conditions left “basically nil” chance of survival and produced extreme suffering. The college pointed then, as it did later, to the Netherlands’ Groningen Protocol as a model worth exploring. It restated the same criteria to British and Canadian media in 2025.
Federal law never followed. Assisted suicide, legalized in 2016 for adults whose deaths were reasonably foreseeable and broadened in 2021 to people with grievous, irremediable conditions that were not terminal, still required the patient to be at least 18 and to request and consent to the procedure. A petition tabled in the House of Commons in December 2025 asked the government to block any move toward children. The Justice Minister’s office replied in January 2026 that infants could not qualify under the existing Criminal Code framework.
Disability organizations and some physicians had objected from the first parliamentary appearance. They argued that infants could not consent, that predictions of “no prospect of survival” had been wrong in the past, and that Canada’s earlier widening of eligibility already showed how criteria loosened. The college and its defenders insisted they were speaking only of conditions incompatible with more than hours or days of life, not of disabilities such as Down syndrome.
While the infant question stayed at the level of a provincial college’s ethics statement, Ottawa spent 2026 on a different expansion. A special joint committee recommended in June that the government indefinitely exclude people whose sole underlying condition was mental illness—an eligibility change that had been scheduled for March 2027 and delayed twice before. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government had not yet introduced legislation on that recommendation by late August. Discussions of “mature minors” likewise produced no statute.
Quebec continues to record the highest assisted-death rate in the country. Official figures showed assisted death accounted for 7.9 percent of all deaths in the province in 2024–25, compared with 5.1 percent nationally. The college that had helped shape Quebec’s original end-of-life law a decade earlier remained the most prominent medical body willing to treat neonatal euthanasia as an open ethical question rather than a closed legal one.
Cover Image: College of Physicians of Quebec office.
