Medically Assisted Death in Canada 1.5

Competing with covid?

This brief bit of analysis comes as a spin-off from this post from Sheldon Yakiwchuk. He observes the rapid acceleration of medically assisted death during covid. The source data is found here. Out of interest, here is the breakdown of provincial data. We see that “MAID” is more popular in some provinces than others, and see that its deployment accelerated more in some provinces than others. Quebec and British Columbia stand out in this dataset.

What explains this variation? One hypothesis would be the size of the elderly population in each province (data here)- presumably, the older the population, the higher the rate of medically assisted death. When we plot these two variables, Quebec and British Columbia still stand out:

It would seem that demographics alone do not explain what is happening with medically assisted death in Canada.