Last year, more than 10,000 Canadians received what is officially known as “medical assistance in dying,” or MAID—a result of a steady relaxation in laws governing euthanasia since 2016. Alexander Raikin examines the chilling results:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised that the euthanasia system would not lead anyone to choose to end his or her life due to a lack of social support. But in private, even practitioners say that the support that Canada most efficiently provides to many vulnerable patients now is death. A core reason that Canada’s assisted-dying program has grown so much faster than any other program in the world is that it is the most permissive. Eligibility criteria began loose and are rapidly getting looser. You do not need to be terminally ill, only to have a “grievous and irremediable” condition, a standard that is open to significant differences in interpretation. In March 2023, mental illness alone will qualify as an acceptable medical reason to die. And the Quebec College of Physicians now suggests that parliament expand euthanasia eligibility to minors and even newborns.

The clearest evidence that Canada’s euthanasia regime is failing to protect the vulnerable is the stories of patients themselves. They have spoken in a series of articles published in other outlets over the past year. They speak on social media. Some of them spoke to me for this article, as did the friends and confidants of another who is no longer with us to speak for herself.

The picture that emerges from them is of people who are in desperate circumstances and unable to get help, and are presented with an easy way out: to make it all go away through a medically assisted death.

For the poor and the vulnerable, for those who are “not getting the supports and cares” they need, as Justin Trudeau put it, all that doctors need to do is find some medical pretext to end their lives. Much as the man with a hammer comes to see everything as a nail, again and again Canada’s euthanasia system looks at vulnerable people and sees good candidates for medical death.

As one sixty-five-year-old disabled man told Raikin, “I really don’t want to die. I just can’t afford to live. . . . The only thing that MAID does is to make my suicide socially acceptable.”

Even if the agreement with Hamas to secure the release of some, and possibly all, of the remaining hostages—and the bodies of those no longer alive—is a prudent decision for Israel, it comes at a very high price: potentially leaving Hamas in control of Gaza and the release of vast numbers of Palestinian prisoners, many with blood on their hands. Nadav Shragai reminds us of the history of such agreements:

We cannot forget that the terrorists released in the Jibril deal during the summer of 1985 became the backbone of the first intifada, resulting in the murder of 165 Israelis. Approximately half of the terrorists released following the Oslo Accords joined Palestinian terror groups, with many participating in the second intifada that claimed 1,178 Israeli lives. Those freed in [exchange for Gilad Shalit in 2011] constructed Gaza, the world’s largest terror city, and brought about the October 7 massacre. We must ask ourselves: where will those released in the 2025 hostage deal lead us?

Taking these painful concessions into account Michael Oren argues that they might nonetheless be necessary:

From day one—October 7, 2023—Israel’s twin goals in Gaza were fundamentally irreconcilable. Israel could not, as its leaders pledged, simultaneously destroy Hamas and secure all of the hostages’ release. The terrorists who regarded the hostages as the key to their survival would hardly give them up for less than an Israeli commitment to end—and therefore lose—the war. Israelis, for their part, were torn between those who felt that they could not send their children to the army so long as hostages remained in captivity and those who held that, if Hamas wins, Israel will not have an army at all.

While 33 hostages will be released in the first stage, dozens—alive and dead—will remain in Gaza, prolonging their families’ suffering. The relatives of those killed by the Palestinian terrorists now going free will also be shattered. So, too, will the Israelis who still see soldiers dying in Gaza almost daily while Hamas rocket fire continues. What were all of Israel’s sacrifices for, they will ask. . . .

Perhaps this outcome was unavoidable from the beginning. Perhaps the deal is the only way of reconciling Israel’s mutually exclusive goals of annihilating Hamas and repatriating the hostages. Perhaps, despite Israel’s subsequent military triumph, this is the price for the failures of October 7.