The MAiD Colouring Book

Somewhere in Canada, a grandfather has been moved to the corner while the government pats itself on the back for funding therapeutic innovation.

The child is on the floor with crayons.

Learning.

In the Brothers Grimm story, a grandfather grows old and frail. The family moves him to the corner. Gives him a wooden bowl. One day they find the grandchild carving something from wood. "What are you making?" they ask.

"A bowl," says the child. "For when you are old."

The child was always watching. The child was always learning what the adults do with people whose bodies work too differently.

Canada gave the child a colouring book to help with that lesson.

In 2022, Health Canada funded a 26-page Medical Assistance in Dying activity book for children. Produced by the Canadian Virtual Hospice. Illustrated in soft, soothing colours. Designed for young people who have someone in their life who may be receiving MAiD. The Health Canada logo is on the back cover.

In 2024, 7% of deceased organ donors in Canada donated following MAiD. Among the four countries studied in the most comprehensive international review, Canada contributed nearly half of all organ donations from MAiD patients. Organ donation following MAiD is now a measurable part of that system. And they illustrated the front door in pastels and gave the children crayons.

What the book is teaching — and why Canada was warned

The book is designed for children aged 6 to 12. The Health Canada logo is on the back cover.

Eligibility criteria from the MAiD Activity Book — funded by Health Canada

The book tells children who can have MAiD. A person qualifies, it explains, if they have a serious illness, disease, or disability that hurts their body or their mind so much that it feels too hard to keep living — and there is no cure, nothing can make the illness or disability go away.

Read that again. Not terminal cancer. Illness, disease, or disability. Body or mind. Too hard to keep living.

Most humans have worst days, worst seasons, worst environments. But if you are disabled, chronically ill, or neurodivergent, those experiences map directly onto the eligibility criteria in this book in a way they do not for everyone else. A bad season is just a bad season — until a government-funded book tells a child it is a reason someone chooses to die.

This book does not determine who is eligible for MAiD. It determines how children interpret who should be.

Then it tells the child not to try to change their mind.

The three medicines — detailed method description for children aged 6–12

The book walks children through the three medicines step by step. The first makes the person feel relaxed and fall asleep. The second causes a coma. The third makes the lungs stop breathing and the heart stop beating. The person's colour may change. They become pale. They will not move. It does not hurt, the book says. It is peaceful.

That is a detailed method description of lethal injection. For six year olds. Funded by Health Canada. Which also funds safe messaging guidelines warning against exactly this kind of content for vulnerable young people.

Both cannot be the standard. Pick one.

What the book does not tell you

The book says it does not hurt. It says it is peaceful. It says it often happens in just a few minutes — but sometimes, rarely, it can take hours. The word "rarely" is doing unverifiable work in that sentence. Rarely according to whom? A CMAJ Open study of MAiD medication protocols noted that timing data from comparable jurisdictions showed deaths ranging from 4 minutes to more than 900 minutes. Canadian cases show a median of around 9 minutes — but the range exists, the complications exist, and the word "rarely" in a children's book is not a clinical standard.

Dr. Joel Zivot, an Associate Professor of Anesthesiology at Emory University and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada, testified before the Senate of Canada Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs during the Bill C-7 hearings in 2021. Based on his research into autopsy findings from lethal injection cases, he argued that the MAiD protocol — which uses a paralyzing drug — produces an outward appearance of peacefulness that cannot be taken as evidence of a peaceful experience. His words to the Senate: "To state that the death that the person feels is peaceful, well, this is unknowable or false… That's a chemical myth that is put in place." He does not settle the question. But he is credible, published, and testified directly to Canada's Senate. The question he raises has not been resolved. The book presents the experience as settled.

Child psychology has specific guidance about equating death with sleep. The reason is developmental: children may confuse the two, misunderstand permanence, or develop fears about sleeping. The book frames death as falling asleep, then a deep coma, then stopping. Comfortable. Peaceful. Like rest. That framing is not clinically neutral. It is a choice. And it is presented as the only version.

The book presents MAiD as a complete and resolved arc. The medicines help the person feel comfortable and peaceful. The person will not be bothered by noise or touch. They do not notice what is happening. It does not hurt. And when it is over, we keep their memory close. From first page to last, the book frames MAiD as a good death — suffering ended, process peaceful, conclusion settled. That framing is not presented as belief. It is presented as fact. No living person can verify that the experience matches the outward appearance the book describes. The outward stillness is produced in part by a paralyzing drug. Dr. Joel Zivot testified to Canada's Senate that this stillness cannot be taken as evidence of what the person actually experiences. Religious and cultural traditions that hold different understandings of death, suffering, and what it means to end a life are not acknowledged. The book does not say: this is one way of understanding what happens. It says: this is what happens. That is not information. That is doctrine.

Religious traditions are honest about this. They say: this is what we believe happens after death. They label it belief. They acknowledge others may believe differently. This book does not. It removes competing frameworks — Catholic, Indigenous, Jewish, Muslim, secular humanist, disability rights — and quietly fills the gap with one interpretation. Peaceful. Resolved. Beyond suffering. Then presents that interpretation as fact, to children who are not equipped to interrogate it, on behalf of a movement with active policy stakes in their acceptance.

That is not neutrality. It is a single worldview dressed as universal care. And Dying With Dignity, which champions the position that religious frameworks about death should not be imposed on others — got Health Canada to impose theirs on everyone's children instead.

The "could I change their mind" section

The book also tells children that the person choosing MAiD probably wishes just as strongly that they could change their illness — and that nothing will change their mind because there is nothing that can help. It tells children who don't want the person to have MAiD that they may feel stuck in the middle, but that no one can make another person change their mind or their feelings.

Do not try.

In safeguarding and child protection literature, this pattern has a name: the systematic preparation of a child to accept something they would otherwise resist — normalizing it gradually, using trusted adult framing, and removing the instinct to question or push back. Whether or not that word applies here, the mechanism does.

"Disability should never be a ground or justification to end someone's life directly or indirectly." — UN human rights experts, January 25, 2021

On January 25, 2021 — before Bill C-7 passed — the United Nations issued a formal statement signed by three Special Rapporteurs. It said: "Under no circumstance should the law provide that it could be a well-reasoned decision for a person with a disabling condition who is not dying to terminate their life with the support of the State."

Canada was warned. In writing. By name.

Canada passed Bill C-7 in March 2021 anyway. Then in 2022, Health Canada funded a colouring book that teaches children aged 6 to 12 that disability and suffering are reasons someone chooses to die.

In March 2025, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities returned. It stated that Track 2 MAiD is based on negative, ableist perceptions of the quality and value of disabled lives. It urged Canada to repeal Track 2 entirely, reject the 2027 mental illness expansion, and reject proposals to extend MAiD to mature minors. Canada has not repealed it. The book is still in circulation.

And somewhere a six year old is colouring the eligibility page, learning that disability and suffering are reasons a grandfather chooses to die — in direct contradiction of international law Canada signed, was warned about, ignored, and has been warned about again.

The grandfather has been moved to the corner. The child has the book. And the book is telling the child exactly what to think about the grandfather. And about themselves.

Before we go further

To be clear about what this argument is and is not.

Children whose families are facing MAiD need support. That is real. Avoidance and silence can increase fear and confusion. Age-appropriate explanation of death is supported by grief research. A tool to help children process what is happening in their family is a legitimate need.

That is not what is being argued against here.

What is being argued is this: a resource produced by a movement with active policy stakes, embedding one worldview without acknowledgment, failing the evidence-based standards of its own field, and presenting disability as an eligible reason to die — to children as young as six, without cultural or religious adaptation, in tension with international law — is not neutral therapeutic care. It is one position dressed as everyone's standard.

You do not have to oppose MAiD to see that problem. You just have to believe that standards exist. And that this book fails them.

A position with a Crayola budget

Catholics produce materials from their tradition and say so. Indigenous communities offer resources grounded in their worldview and say so. Faith communities write from their beliefs and say so. Nobody is confused about what they are receiving or who made it.

A MAiD advocacy movement — one actively lobbying for expansion, with formal submissions on extending assisted death to mature minors already on record — does not get the same pass when it frames its materials as neutral therapeutic support for all children.

That is not neutrality. That is a position with a Crayola budget.

The movement would like you to note the credential. The book was written by a McMaster University lecturer and grief consultant. This is true. Residential schools were also administered by credentialed people with government funding. Forced sterilization of Indigenous and Disabled women was signed off by professionals operating within sanctioned systems. Canada just tabled new legislation to further criminalize forced sterilization because it is still happening.

The credential is not the argument. It is the outfit.

The book's own acknowledgments name the National Working Group that developed and reviewed it. That working group includes Helen Long, current Chief Executive Officer of Dying With Dignity Canada, and Shanaaz Gokool, former Chief Executive Officer of Dying With Dignity Canada. It also includes Stefanie Green, President of the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers and a member of the Dying With Dignity Advisory Council, and Kim Wiebe, Board Member of the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers. Both Green and Wiebe are MAiD providers who have personally performed the procedure.

The organization actively lobbying for MAiD expansion — including to mature minors — had its current CEO, its former CEO, and two board members of the associated clinical body on the working group that produced these materials. Those materials were then promoted by Dying With Dignity Canada.

This is not a conflict of interest adjacent to the book. It is documented in the book's own pages.

The institution changed. The pattern did not.

The government used to use the church for this. Not metaphorically. Literally. Residential schools ran on government funding and the shared conviction that certain lives needed to be corrected, redirected, or removed. That system is now rightly prosecuted as a crime. But the function did not disappear. It got rebranded.

Now the government funds lobby groups. The lobby groups produce the frameworks. The frameworks become the therapeutic standard. And the church gets framed as the obstacle to compassionate modern care.

The institution changed. The pattern did not.

In Ontario, 87,692 children are registered with the autism program. Only 23% have active funding. The minister was asked directly if the wait time was acceptable. He refused to answer. In BC, the government recently scrapped individualized autism funding, leaving roughly 10,000 children with less support than before.

Jordan's Principle funding for First Nations children's educational support in Ontario dropped from $122.1 million to $1.2 million in a single year. Same children. One hundred times less. Canada's position at the Human Rights Tribunal: even if that's discriminatory, Parliament controls the money and the tribunal can't make them fix it.

They couldn't fund Jordan's Principle. But they funded the book.

These are the children who cannot get funding to go to school. Disability. Body or mind. Too hard to keep living. Nothing can make it better.

In Ontario, a child connected to the care network dies on average every three days. The Ford government recently stopped tracking and reporting those deaths — rejecting a freedom of information request and confirming the data has not been compiled for 2024 or 2025. Internal communications show officials flagged the deaths as a potential "coverage problem."

They couldn't fund the services. They stopped counting the bodies. And they flagged the dead children as a communications problem.

Note the sequence. They funded the colouring book first. Then they stopped counting. They taught the children not to push back. Then made sure nobody else could count.

The families raising alarms are not paranoid. They are reading the eligibility criteria.

The safe messaging problem

#codePINK — Canada's children's hospitals declared a mental health emergency in 2021. The same year Health Canada funded the colouring book.

The Step-by-Step section — a numbered, structured walkthrough of the MAiD process

Health Canada funds Canada's safe messaging guidelines on suicide and death communication for young people precisely because detailed method descriptions, framing death as painless and resolved, and stepwise normalization carry documented risk. The book violates every single one of those standards. Not incidentally. Structurally.

It has a section called "Step-by-Step." Numbered steps. Walking children through the entire process from application to death confirmation — including that after the third medicine the person's colour may change, they become pale, and they will not move.

The book also includes a question and answer sheet for the child to fill out. The questions include: Can I be there when they are having MAiD? And: Can I see them or their body after MAiD has happened? That is not grief support. That is participation planning. With a form to fill out.

And it will reach Autistic children. Meta-analyses show Autistic youth experience suicidal ideation at roughly one in four, and suicide attempts at double the rate of non-Autistic peers. Youth with chronic physical illness alone are three times more likely to attempt suicide.

The eligibility section of this book describes the lives of disabled and chronically ill children as a reason an adult chose death. The method section describes lethal injection in clinical detail. The Step-by-Step section walks them through the process from start to finish. The section on changing minds tells them not to try. The participation section gives them a form to request to be there when it happens.

In suicide prevention, a plan changes everything. Ideation is one threshold. A method, steps, a sequence, a timeline — that is crisis. That is the clinical flag that requires immediate intervention. If a child in distress described to a counsellor everything in this book — the method, the steps, what the body does, that it doesn't hurt, that nothing will change the outcome, that they could be there when it happens — that counsellor would be required to act.

The book hands children that plan pre-formed. Government funded. Illustrated. Normalized. Before anyone screens them.

And then — if that child is disabled, and they do seek help, and they are assessed — they enter a system that uses the same criteria the book just taught them. Body or mind. Too hard to keep living. Nothing can make it better. The book is not just a trigger. It is a preview of the off-ramp.

Suicide prevention says: if you have a plan, we intervene. We find reasons to stay. But for a disabled child in Canada, the intervention pathway now includes a system that will formally assess whether their suffering qualifies them for the very thing the book normalized.

The net has a hole in it. The hole is exactly the size and shape of a disabled child who believed what they read in this book.

Health Canada funds the guidelines that say this messaging is dangerous. Health Canada also funded the book. These positions cannot both be true. One of them has the logo on the back.

The International Association for Suicide Prevention stated in their 2025 position statement that even when suffering convincingly appears hopeless, premature deaths can be prevented. Research and clinical experience indicate that steps can still be taken to remediate suffering and the reasons motivating a desire to die. The book does tell children the person can change their mind at any time — even right before they receive the medicine. What it does not tell children is that people actually do. That support changes outcomes. That circumstances shift. That environment is not destiny. The legal right to withdraw is there. The human reality that people find reasons to stay is not.

There is also what the book does not explain. Clinical guidance from the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers states that clinicians have a professional obligation to raise MAiD with patients they believe may be eligible. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario notes that not all patients will be aware MAiD is a legally available option for them. The book tells children the person had to ask for MAiD themselves — nobody can ask for someone else. But the clinical system is designed so that an eligible person may be identified and approached before they ever ask. The initiative is not always theirs.

The book also does not tell children that in some circumstances someone else can sign the request form on their behalf — a paid caregiver, a professional personal care worker — if the person cannot physically sign. It does not tell children what to do if they are concerned about that process. It does not tell children that assessors may be meeting someone for the first time, that assessments can be thirty minutes to two hours, or that the tools for screening coercion and crisis from a settled autonomous wish are limited. These are the things a child might actually need to know.

The book claims to be age-appropriate information. Age-appropriate information about death does not include detailed method descriptions, step-by-step procedural walkthroughs, inevitability framing, removal of the instinct to question, or a form to request to be present at the death. Those are the specific elements that safe messaging guidelines — funded by the same government — identify as triggers for ideation in vulnerable young people. The book does not fail the age-appropriate standard incidentally. It includes the exact content the standard prohibits.

A rights violation, not just a values disagreement

The Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association's own guiding principles require care sensitive to the child's and family's personal, cultural, and spiritual values, beliefs, and practices. The colouring book cannot meet that standard. It arrives pre-loaded with one secular, medicalized conclusion and no capacity to adapt. A Catholic family cannot use it without receiving a framework that contradicts their beliefs. An Indigenous family cannot use it without their understanding of life and death being quietly overwritten. A disabled child cannot use it without being taught that their body is an eligible reason someone chooses to die.

This raises serious questions under both international and Canadian domestic law.

The Canadian Human Rights Act — Section 3 — lists disability as a prohibited ground of discrimination. The same Act. The same legal weight as race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation. The same protection.

Consider this. If a government-funded book told children that being Black, or gay, or Indigenous — that having that identity — causes suffering so profound that it feels too hard to keep living, and nothing can make it better, and that is why someone chooses to die — it would be pulled the same day. There would be no debate.

Disability is on the same list. The same Act. The same protection.

But because the suffering of disabled people has been normalized — because we have been taught, including by books like this one, that disability and suffering are the same thing — it does not land the same way. That differential response is itself the discrimination. The ableism is so embedded it does not register as discrimination. It registers as compassion.

A government-funded resource that presents disability as an eligible reason to die raises serious questions under Section 3 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. The Act's stated purpose is to ensure all individuals have equal opportunity to make for themselves the lives they want, without being hindered by discriminatory practices. A book that embeds disability as an eligibility criterion for death — for children — does not meet that standard.

The UN said in January 2021 that laws like Bill C-7 would "institutionalize and legally authorize ableism." That is not our characterization. That is the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. In writing. Before Canada passed the law.

And the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities went further — in an official report to the Human Rights Council — drawing a direct line from ableist assumptions in assisted dying legislation to the extermination of more than 300,000 people with disabilities during Nazi Germany. The Rapporteur was explicit: those ableist ideas did not disappear. They still influence current discussions about assisted dying laws. That is not our characterization. It is the UN's.

Canada is bound by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 30 guarantees Indigenous and minority children the right to enjoy their own culture and practise their own religion. Article 14 protects freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Indigenous youth already die by suicide at five to seven times the non-Indigenous rate — up to eleven times higher for Inuit youth.

Canada is also bound by its own law. Bill C-15 — the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act — received Royal Assent on June 21, 2021, making UNDRIP implementation Canadian law. The colouring book was funded in 2022. After UNDRIP was law.

The book contains no Indigenous framework. No Elder involvement is noted. No cultural adaptation for Indigenous families. No acknowledgment that Indigenous communities hold distinct understandings of life, death, and dying that may not align with its framing. Under UNDRIP and Bill C-15, the principle of free, prior and informed consent requires that materials affecting Indigenous children's understanding of life and death reflect Indigenous communities' involvement. The book shows no evidence of it.

And the UN told Canada in 2021: disability should never be a ground or justification to end someone's life. Canada nodded, passed the law anyway, funded the book, and is now handing it to the children the UN was trying to protect. That is not a policy disagreement. That is a government teaching children something it was explicitly told not to teach them. About the people they love. About themselves.

The fairy tale was never for the children

In the Brothers Grimm story, the parents only understand what they have done when they see the child carving the bowl. The lesson was never spoken. It was demonstrated. And the child absorbed it perfectly.

The colouring book is the demonstration.

Soft colours. Gentle language. Step-by-step instructions. Do not try to change their mind. A system behind it that calculated the net savings, expanded fourteen times faster per capita than California, stopped counting the children dying in its care, cut the waitlists, took away the school funding, was warned twice by the UN, and is pushing toward younger and younger populations.

The fairy tale was never for the children. It was about them.

And the parents, the faith communities, the disability advocates, the Indigenous leaders raising alarms — they are not being paranoid. They are doing what the parents in the old story did when they finally saw the bowl. They recognized what was being learned.

The ask is simple

To every disability advocate, faith leader, Indigenous leader, pediatrician, child welfare worker, journalist, and elected official who has read this far:

You have seen what the book says. You have seen what the UN said — twice. You have seen what the waitlists look like. You have seen what stopping the count means. You know what the minister refused to answer.

Now move.

This is not a partisan issue. You do not have to oppose MAiD to see the problem. You just have to believe that a government-funded book teaching children what to think about disability and death — in tension with international law, without parental consent, to children as young as six — is not neutral care.

A movement with active policy stakes does not get to certify its own materials as the universal therapeutic standard for every child. That standard belongs to the evidence, the ethics, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the CRPD, the OHCHR, UNDRIP, and every family at the table. Not only the ones who already agree.

They couldn't fund the school.
They couldn't fund the waitlist.
They couldn't fund the services that would give these children a reason to stay.

But they funded the book that teaches children that no one can change your mind about dying.

The grandfather has his wooden bowl. The child has MAiD crayons. And somewhere in a corner of this country, a six year old is colouring what they have been taught to believe about the people they love. And about themselves.