Only 41% of Canadians support doctors who oppose euthanasia: new survey

That fact is apparently not obvious enough to many Canadians. A new survey, recently published by Research Co., found that just “under two-in-five would support a bill to allow health care professionals to object on moral or faith-based grounds.”

Research Co.’s survey was done March 22-24 with 1,001 adults, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

According to the survey, only 41% of Canadians believe that medical professionals should “have the ability to object to providing services if they have a moral or faith-based objection to physician assisted death,” although this is up 5% since a similar poll in 2022.

Conversely, 42% disagree, believing, in essence, that medical professionals should be legally obligated to participate in euthanasia, which involves actively killing a patient via lethal injection. Forty-eight percent of Canadians also said that medical professionals “should not be able to object to providing” abortion, rising to 51% among women.

Surprisingly, 47% of Albertans oppose “moral or faith-based objections” in euthanasia, with Atlantic Canada standing at 45%, Quebec at 44%, Ontario at 41%, BC at 41%, and Saskatchewan and Manitoba at 36%. Unsurprisingly, older Canadians — those over 55 — are most opposed to moral objections (45%), with the 35-54 age range at 42% and 18-38 category at 39%. The younger you are, the more likely you are to support conscience protections.

Still, support for conscience rights is depressingly low across Canada, with 46% opposing a bill that would “allow health care professionals the ability to have a moral or faith-based objection to providing services,” only 38% supporting it, and 16% undecided. Support is highest in Saskatchewan and Manitoba (45%); Ontario is at 43%, BC, 41%, Alberta, 38%, Quebec, 30%, and Atlantic Canada, 29%.

“More than half of Conservative Party voters in the 2025 federal election (53%) would permit moral or faith-based objections in health care delivery,” Mario Canseco, president of Research Co., noted. “The proportion drops to 36% among Liberal Party voters and to 34% among New Democratic Party (NDP) voters.”

It is unclear how this data fits into the overall euthanasia debate in Canada; the Overton window has shifted against expansion over the past several years. A recent survey, for example, indicated that 50% of Canadians are now opposed to expanding euthanasia to those suffering solely from mental illness, with only 28% supporting the expansion. A super-majority of 82% of Canadians “feel mental health care should be improved” before any expansion is implemented.

I wonder how Canadians might respond if more detailed but extremely plausible scenarios were laid out for them. If a doctor is presented with a 19-year-old Canadian suffering from severe but treatable depression if the scheduled expansion of euthanasia for mental illness is implemented in March 2027, should he be entitled to exercise his conscience and refuse to kill that patient or to facilitate that patient’s killing? Or should he be forced to participate in something that he believes to be murder?

Polling like this indicates, once again, that Robert Jay Lifton’s magisterial work The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide should be mandatory reading not just in medical schools but in universities more generally. If a society decides to force doctors to operate without conscience — something millions of Canadians apparently support — that society will get precisely what it asks for: medical professionals without conscience, subject only to the will of the state.

Canadians should be very careful what they wish for.