Canadian Priest Says Hospital Asked Him To Consider Assisted Suicide Twice After Broken Hip

A Catholic priest said that while seeking treatment for a hip injury at a Canadian hospital, medical workers twice offered him the option of assisted suicide, despite knowing that he was religiously and morally opposed to the practice.

Fr. Larry Holland, 79, fractured his hip after falling in his bathroom on Christmas Day 2025 and subsequently went to Vancouver General Hospital to seek treatment for his injury, The B.C. Catholic, the official media outlet of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver, first reported. However, despite the priest’s assertion that his condition is not and never was fatal, he says a doctor had raised the possibility of him taking his own life through Canada’s taxpayer-funded and government-run Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program in the event his injury worsened.

“I think I was very shocked. It is such a sensitive subject,” Holland told The B.C. Catholic about being given the option of MAiD, in an interview published Tuesday. “There are some things you just don’t talk about to some people.”

The priest told the outlet that the doctor said to him that MAiD is “something they have to discuss with someone who’s been given a terminal diagnosis.” Holland had at the time known made his moral opposition to euthanasia — which Catholic doctrine explicitly forbids.

After weeks passed, a nurse would also offer MAiD to Holland, he told The B.C. Catholic, adding that the nurse’s offer appeared to come out of a sense of “false compassion.”

Vancouver Coastal Health, the taxpayer-funded government health authority that operates Vancouver General Hospital under Canada’s single-payer healthcare system, told The B.C. Catholic that its hospital’s “staff may consider bringing up MAiD based on their clinical judgment, provided they possess the necessary knowledge and skills to do so.”

The health authority did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for additional comment.

“Intentional euthanasia, whatever its forms or motives, is murder. It is gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God his Creator,” paragraph 2323 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church states.

“Suicide is seriously contrary to justice, hope and charity. It is forbidden by the fifth commandment,” the very next paragraph, paragraph 2325, reads. Catholics recognize the fifth commandment to be “You shall not kill.”

Canada’s MAiD program accounted for just under 5% of the total Canadian death total in 2023, the BBC reported in December 2024. The median age of Canadians who died from government-assisted suicide that year was 77, two years younger than Holland.

The U.S.’ northern neighbor legalized assisted suicide under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016. Between then and mid-2024, the amount of MAiD deaths in Canada increased by a factor of 13, LifeSite News reported in August 2024 citing Canadian think tank Cardus’ study that month. This made the country’s MAiD the fastest-growing assisted suicide program in the world.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC) estimated that by the end of 2025, a total of 94,125 Canadians died as a result of government-assisted suicide, placing the country on track to be the first ever to record a total of 100,000 such deaths some time in 2026.

Canadian doctors on average reported a wait time of nearly 29 weeks — over half a year — between a patient getting a referral by a general practitioner to receiving treatment, the Fraser Institute reported citing 2025 data. In British Columbia, the province where Holland lives and was hospitalized, had an even higher average wait time of 32 weeks.