False Claim: Jocelyn Downie says the mentally ill must be euthanized lest the kill themselves

On April 9, 2026, Tristin Hopper—a reporter and columnist for the National Post—claimed that Jocelyn Downie testified in Parliament that the “mentally ill must be euthanized lest they kill themselves” (Hopper, April 9, 2026). That is not true.

Based on his headline, Hopper would have readers believe that Downie thinks euthanasia is a remedy for mental illness. Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition took this even further, writing that “Downie is saying that the answer to suicidal ideation is suicide.”

Neither of these claims is true. Here is the full statement by Jocelyn Downie:

" With regard to the impact on patients, I would encourage the committee to watch a documentary by Marc de Guerre, who talked to two people who, after the documentary, ended their lives by suicide because of the extension. They had been waiting, and they said, “We cannot wait anymore.

"What will happen if there is an extension or an exclusion is that people will die by suicide. They will go to Switzerland because they can access it there, or they will not get MAID in either way and will continue to experience enduring and intolerable suffering caused by a serious and incurable disease. They just have to have that suffering."

What Downie is saying is not a “threat,” as the EPC framed it, but rather a sober acknowledgement of the consequences of continuing to deny people living with incurable and intractable mental illness the same rights as those suffering from a physical condition.

Just as Kay Carter felt forced to travel to Switzerland to end her life through assisted suicide because of what was later found to be an unconstitutional prohibition on MAiD, Downie is pointing out that some people with mental illness will feel forced to do the same—like Carter—because of what Downie and many others believe is an unconstitutional exclusion of mental illness as a serious and incurable illness.

Tristin Hopper and Alex Schadenberg have twisted Downie’s words to suit their chosen narrative. This is a classic straw man argument: taking a nuanced legal and ethical point, distorting it into something extreme, then attacking the distortion.

Rather than engage with what Downie actually said, they substituted a more inflammatory version that is easier to condemn. It is a familiar tactic in contentious debates: avoid the real argument, invent a weaker one, and attack that instead.