The double-double is a quintessential coffee order in the Great North. Every morning, Canadians go through the drive-thru at Tim Hortons, the coffee shop on virtually every street, and order it. Two creams, two sugars.
But there’s a new double-double up North: death and donuts. The National Post reported this week that a London, Ontario doctor provided a euthanasia assessment outside a Tim Hortons then drove the patient (who suffered from inflammatory bowel disease and a history of mental health issues) to the facility where a doctor ended his life.
The National Post also reported that the same doctor, James MacLean, breached protocols when he failed to give one of the three drugs used in the cocktail that ends patients’ lives. MacLean didn’t bring the neuromuscular-blocking drug with him that paralyzes the body — including the muscles used to breathe. “The patient resumed spontaneously breathing again after initially being pronounced dead, and after MacLean had already left the home.”
This story strikes close to home, quite literally. It’s not solely because I’ve lost family members to medical assistance in dying (MAID). Nor is it because doctors have offered MAID to members of my community who didn’t request it and now fear the health centers meant to give them care.
The reason the revelation of these horrors strikes so close to home is because MacLean practices at the same clinic as my family physician. My own child has been treated by him at a walk-in clinic. Friends and family, including myself, receive primary care in the very location where he continues to work.
This isn’t a distant scandal. It’s happening where my loved ones seek health and healing, people who could be one coffee or car ride away from an encounter with death.
The message, if there is one, from the Canadian health system to patients seems to be: deal with it. MacLean has been given less than a slap on the wrist.
What are other doctors who assess and administer MAID up to?
Restaurants receive more consequences over spoiled food or health and safety policy violations than doctors in Canada receive for ending the lives of patients under questionable circumstances.
Ontario has harsher penalties for aggressive speeding (30-day license revocation), exterminating bats ($10,000 fine), and selling raw milk ($10,000 fine and six months in jail for second offenders) than for doctors who stray outside the expansive MAID laws to end a human life.
A recent report revealed that Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s chief coroner has noted 428 possible criminal violations of MAID laws since Ontario physicians and nurse practitioners started to administer euthanasia in 2016. Yet not a single one has been referred to law enforcement.
Here, a doctor like MacLean isn’t even sanctioned, simply supervised, and continues to practice life-ending assessments and procedures.
Trudo Lemmens is a professor in health policy at the University of Toronto, a member of the Advisory Committee on Health Research of the Pan American Health Organization, and served as a member of two expert panels of the Council of Canadian Academies, including one for advance requests of MAID. He publicly noted astonishment at the flaccid response of MAID overseers to MacLean’s reported behavior.
“If someone would have said 10 years ago this would happen, I also would have thought this to be unlikely…. [The] level of ideological zeal we are witnessing here…reveals in my view one of the most pernicious and far-reaching results of our legalized MAID regime: the trivialization of the seriousness of doctors ending the lives of patients,” he said.
Since MAID changed from murder to mandated health care in 2016, more than 76,475 Canadians have died at the hands of doctors and nurses. The number continues to climb, yet the standards of care keep falling. And MAID is still in its infancy in Canada. Come March 2027, it will expand to mental illness as a sole qualifying condition — a policy the Liberal government remains determined to implement despite widespread warnings of inevitable moral catastrophe.
If Canadians do not demand serious oversight, accountability, and a change in trajectory, the new double-double will become as ubiquitous as Tim Hortons itself: death and donuts available on every street corner, normalized, trivialized, and served with a smile. What was once an unthinkable policy to legal experts will become the national norm.
Will Canadians continue to tolerate it, or will they finally say “enough?”
