If you were to guess at the number of people signing up for legal assisted suicide in Canada, you probably guess a few people a year, right? Maybe a few dozen at most?

Try 45,000 people — the population of Palm Springs, California.

That’s how many people have killed themselves through Canada’s Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) program since assisted suicide was legalized in 2016.

The number of deaths is still exploding, with thousands more people taking advantage of the program each year.

A total of 44,958 people have ended their lives through MAID over the seven years from 2016 to 2022, the last year with available data, according to Health Canada.

The first year, 1,018 people died. That number nearly tripled the next year to over 2,800 people. Over the next few years deaths continued to skyrocket, sometimes thousands each year. By 2020, the number of people killed had topped 10,000, and by 2022 the number had reached a whopping 13,241 people, 4.1% of all deaths in Canada that year.

Canada’s program has come under scrutiny for its liberal approach to approving applicants, especially people suffering from mental illness.

At first, only adults whose natural death is “reasonably foreseeable” could get approved. In 2021, Canada expanded it to adults whose natural death is not “reasonably foreseeable,” such as those with non-terminal illnesses and disabilities. In 2027 the program will be expanded further to people whose sole reason for wanting to die is a mental health condition.

Already though, Canadians with a history of mental illness have been allowed to end their lives.

Alan Nichols, 61, was hospitalized in 2019 over fears he might be suicidal and asked his brother to “bust him out” as soon as possible. However, within a month he had applied for assisted suicide and was killed. He listed “hearing loss” as the one reason he wanted to die.

Another man, Amir Farsoud, 54, was living with agonizing chronic back pain and took depression and anxiety medication. He wanted to end his life using MAID in 2022 as he was unable to work and lived on government checks and felt there was no way to avoid homelessness when the shared house he rented was listed for sale.

He changed his mind, however, only after good Samaritans stepped up and raised more than $60,000 for him.

“I’m a different person,” Farsoud said. “I had nothing but darkness, misery, stress and hopelessness. Now I have all the opposite of those things.”

Recently, a chilling exchange between Dr. Ellen Wiebe, who runs an assisted suicide clinic in Canada, and Liz Carr, a comedian, actress and disability rights campaigner made the rounds on social media.

The Canadian doctor Liz Carr interviews in this is one of the most frightening people I have ever seen. pic.twitter.com/K9jL057Nyi

— Billy Bragg (@Serena_Partrick) October 5, 2024

Carr has used a wheelchair ever since an illness when she was just seven-years-old and is a vocal opponent of assisted suicide. She is concerned about vulnerable people requesting assisted suicide or even feeling compelled to do so.

“Apart from the fact I don’t have the desire, I think probably I would be eligible under the Canadian law,” Carr told Wiebe.

Wiebe, who also runs an abortion clinic, said she has been involved in more than 400 deaths and called it “the very best work” she has ever done.

The clinician has killed a businesswoman diagnosed with dementia in her fifties, a military veteran with PTSD and chronic pain, and even a 56-year-old woman with advanced multiple sclerosis who starved herself to make sure her death was “reasonably foreseeable” back when that was a requirement of MAID.

Wiebe injects her patients with a lethal cocktail of drugs that causes unconsciousness, then cardiac or respiratory arrest.

Canada is not the only country where mentally ill people have been euthanized.

In the Netherlands, several different women in their 20s have been allowed to die by assisted suicide based on mental suffering alone as well as a 28-year-old autistic woman who suffered from chronic fatigue.

However, Canada’s law is one of the most loosely regulated, and the criticism has been fierce, swift, and global.

Earlier this year, The Washington Post urged Canada to “rethink” its “risky expansion” of euthanasia, saying the upcoming expansion to mental illness “goes too far.”

“Many in the grips of psychiatric distress view, temporarily, suicide as their only way out, only to later be grateful they did not kill themselves in the depths of their suffering,” the editorial board wrote.

Canada’s law is “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s,” declared Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia.

Even Pope Francis spoke out against the law during his trip to Canada, lamenting the “patients who, in place of affection, are administered death.”

Meanwhile, the bodies are piling up.