False Claim: RFK Jr. claims MAiD is the leading cause of death in Canada

On April 22, at a senate committee on finance at Capitol Hill in Washington DC, United States Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr. claimed that MAiD is the number one cause of death in Canada.

This has already been labelled as misleading by The Canadian Press. We will go further and say this is completely false.

There are at least two reasons this is false:

First, over 60% of those that have MAiD did so because of advanced cancer. The cause of death in those cases was cancer, while the mechanism of death was MAiD.

This is like a case where someone had a catastrophic head injury and was intubated in hospital but was then had the breathing tube removed, leading to their death. The cause of death would not be the removal of life support—it would the head injury.

Second, there were 16,499 MAiD deaths in Canada in 2024. Even if MAiD were to be considered a cause of death (which it is not) there were 85,589 cancer deaths in 2024; heart disease caused 57,982 deaths; and there were over 20,000 accidental deaths. It is factually, medically, and statistically untrue that MAiD is the number one cause of death in Canada.

Anti-MAID activists often claim that MAiD is a leading cause of death because it creates a sensational headline. This is an example of emotional manipulation. Don’t fall for it.