False Claim: “the Liberals proposed assisted suicide for people suffering from terminal illness”

In a May 10, 2026 editorial, the Toronto Sun made the false statement that “the Liberals proposed assisted suicide for people suffering from terminal illness,” referring to the legalization of MAiD in 2016.

This is simply false. MAiD became legal because of a Supreme Court of Canada decision. In Carter v. Canada, the Court found that the blanket prohibition on assisted dying violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Liberal Party, and Justin Trudeau in particular, are often blamed by MAiD opponents for legalizing MAiD. But while the Liberals did pass Canada’s first MAiD legislation, they did so because they happened to win the federal election shortly after the Carter decision.

If the Conservative Party had won that election, it would have been responsible for passing MAiD legislation instead. The law may have looked different, certainly. But Parliament would still have been required to create some form of legal access to MAiD.

The Toronto Sun then blamed current deliberations about MAiD for mental illness on the Liberals, arguing that they “hadn’t foreseen … the argument that it’s unconstitutional to restrict MAID only to those whose physical body is shutting down and dying.”

The Sun correctly recognized that the constitutional questions surrounding the exclusion of people whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness flow directly from the original legal reasoning in Carter: that a blanket prohibition on MAiD was unconstitutional. But it placed the blame for that constitutional framework on the Liberals, when the decision was actually made by the non-partisan Supreme Court of Canada.

It is difficult to believe the editorial board is unaware of these basic facts. And if they are aware of them, then this is not simply misinformation. It is disinformation.