In 2016, Canada dramatically liberalized its rules regarding physician-administered suicide. A new law will take effect in March making “medical assistance in dying,” or MAID, available to those who suffer from mental illness alone. Brian Bird comments on the slippery slope the country appears to be sliding down:

As of 2022, euthanasia was virtually tied with cerebrovascular disease as the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada (with only accidents, COVID-19, cancer, and heart disease causing more deaths). In each of the preceding years starting in 2016, the number of deaths by euthanasia grew significantly. Between 2019 and 2022, the average increase was just over 31 percent per year.

These statistics reveal disturbing truths about what happens when a society legalizes euthanasia. Canadians have been told by advocates, legislatures, and courts that euthanasia is a basic good. But in truth, euthanasia teaches that human dignity is degradable rather than enduring. It creates hierarchies of personhood by calling into question the worth and value of certain individuals based on their strengths and abilities—things that, by nature, are mutable. This is always and everywhere a fundamental injustice. In Canada, this injustice is surfacing in deeply damaging ways.

Today, Prime Minister Netanyahu is expected to meet with President Trump in the White House. High on their agenda will be Iran, and the next steps following the joint assault on its nuclear facilities, as well as the latest proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza. But there are other equally weighty matters that the two leaders are apt to discuss. Eran Lerman, calling this a White House visit “unlike any before it,” surveys some of those matters, beginning with efforts to improve relations between Israel and the Arab states—above all Saudi Arabia:

[I]t is a safe bet that no White House signing ceremony is in the offing. A much more likely scenario would involve—if the language from Israel on the Palestinian future is sufficiently vague and does not preclude the option of (limited) statehood—a return to the pre-7 October 2023 pattern of economic ventures, open visits at the ministerial level, and a growing degree of discussion and mutual cooperation on regional issues such as Lebanon and Syria.

In fact, writes Lerman, those two countries will also be major conversation topics. The president and the prime minister are likely to broach as well the possible opening of relations between Jerusalem and Damascus, a goal that is

realistic in light of reconstruction needs of this devastated country, all the more destitute once the Assad clan’s main source of income, the massive production and export of [the drug] Captagon, has been cut off. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia want to see Syria focused on its domestic needs—and as much as possible, free from the powerful grip of Turkey. It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration, with its soft spot for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, will do its part.