Article By Frank Bergman
Canada’s euthanasia campaign is escalating into a direct attack on Catholic hospitals, with the nation’s progressive establishment demanding that religious institutions begin euthanizing their patients or leave the healthcare system altogether.
Toronto’s Globe and Mail, the nation’s largest newspaper, published an editorial that presents Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program as an opportunity to secularize religious hospitals.
The demand exposes how the campaign once promoted as a matter of individual choice is now targeting institutions that refuse to participate in ending patients’ lives.
‘Get Out of the Business Altogether’
Andre Picard’s October 6 column, titled “It’s well past time for Catholic hospitals to be secularized,” singled out the country’s Catholic healthcare institutions.
“One hundred and twenty-nine of Canada’s 1,087 hospitals are Catholic,” Picard wrote.
“Most refuse to perform medical assistance in dying, abortion, tubal ligation, hysterectomy, vasectomy, gender-affirming care, or provide birth control to patients …”
The euthanasia advocate also targeted religious facilities caring for elderly and vulnerable residents.
“Many long-term care homes with religious affiliations also refuse to allow MAiD on their premises,” Picard wrote.
His conclusion left little room for those institutions to retain their principles.
“MAiD has become the catalyst for long-overdue change,” Picard wrote.
“Religious hospitals need to either offer care without discrimination or get out of the business altogether.”
The ultimatum turns refusal to participate in euthanasia into grounds for pushing Christian institutions out of healthcare.
Hospitals founded and operated to provide life-saving care are being told that their continued place in the system depends on abandoning convictions that prohibit deliberately ending a patient’s life.
From Personal ‘Choice’ to Institutional Pressure
The demand marks a stark escalation in the euthanasia movement’s ambitions.
The issue is no longer simply whether an individual can request assisted death.
It’s whether hospitals and care homes will be permitted to refuse involvement.
Picard explicitly identified MAiD as the catalyst for removing religious control from those institutions.
That puts the independence of Catholic healthcare providers, and access to facilities that do not administer euthanasia, directly in the campaign’s path.
The Globe and Mail’s role also matters.
Canada’s longtime paper of record has a documented history of using sustained editorial campaigning to push controversial changes onto the national agenda.
In his history of Canada’s abortion debate, F.L. Morton described the newspaper’s alliance with abortion-law reformers.
“Short-term success was unlikely without a sympathetic portrayal by the national media,” Morton wrote.
“Events are not ‘news’ unless they are reported. Reporters, editors, and producers have the discretion to ‘make news’ and to couch issues in either a positive or negative light.
“Normally, the policy recommendations of professional organizations are not front-page news, and politicians rarely feel pressed to respond to much else.
“It was thus the good fortune of the pro-(abortion) forces to find not just a friend but a veritable ally in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
“Beginning in 1961, the Globe and Mail mounted an editorial crusade for abortion law reform.
“Abortion-related news was routinely accorded front-page coverage, while scores of editorials were used to cheer reformers, chide the timid, and castigate the opposition.”
“By the fall of 1967, the Globe’s persistent and partisan coverage had achieved its intended effect,” Morton added.
“It had nudged the abortion issue out of the backwaters of legal and medical journals and onto the centre of Canada’s political agenda.”
The latest column similarly presents a sweeping activist demand as overdue reform: religious hospitals must conform or disappear from the system.
Patients Want Hospitals Where They Are Safe From MAID
The push ignores patients who specifically value institutions that refuse to provide euthanasia.
That concern extends beyond Christians.
Author Catherine Frazee, who has disabilities, explained why she and her partner would welcome care in a religious hospital.
“On the question of religious hospitals, despite being a lesbian couple, Patricia and I would tolerate life-size crucifixes in the treatment room if it meant being safe from MAiD,” Frazee wrote.
Her words expose what the secularization demand threatens to remove: a place where vulnerable patients can receive treatment knowing the institution will not participate in assisted death.
“If in a hundred years Christians are identified as people who do not kill their children or the elderly, we will have done well,” Stanley Hauerwas said.
For patients seeking protection from euthanasia, Catholic hospitals’ refusal is a reason to preserve them.
Picard’s proposal would make that same refusal grounds for forcing them out.
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