(LifeSiteNews) — Ontario’s Handbook on Certification of Death opens with a quote from the 1955 UN Handbook of Vital Statistics Methods: “It may truthfully be said that virtually every large-scale problem in preventive medicine has been brought to light – in part at least – by statistics of death, and further that the adequacy of remedial or curative action is, in the last analysis, reflected in these same statistics.”

That, of course, is only true if the statistics are recorded accurately. Later in the same handbook, for example, is this instruction: “For deaths involving MAID, the illness, disease, or disability leading to the request for assistance is to be recorded as the underlying cause of death. This condition will be selected as the cause of death for vital statistics. There should be no mention of the injection or ingestion of drugs.”

Thus, when someone is killed by a euthanasia practitioner via lethal injection in Ontario, the lethal injection is not recorded as their cause of death. Instead, the cause of death is recorded as whatever the “MAID assessors” decided made the patient eligible for a lethal injection in the first place. If someone is euthanized for a non-life-threatening disability or disease, the death certificate records what amounts to an official lie: That they were killed by their condition, rather than … what actually killed them.

Over 20,000 people have died by euthanasia in Ontario alone — but each of their death certificates will omit that essential and central fact. The actual cause of death is memory holed. The details of “MAID provision” are instead found in separate reporting to the Office of the Chief Coroner and Health Canada’s federal monitoring system.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario also emphasizes this. On their “Advice to the Profession: Medical Aid in Dying” website, they note:

When completing a medical certificate of death for a person to whom MAID has been administered:

The illness, disease or disability leading to the request for MAID is to be recorded as the cause of death.

The certificate cannot include any reference to MAID or the medications administered.

The Solicitor General’s “Checklist for MAID Providers” states:

The MAiD provider should complete the Medical Certificate of Death immediately except in cases where they have been instructed by the MAiD Coroner Investigator not to (injury, accident). See below (#3). i. When completing the Medical Certificate of Death, please note that the illness, disease or disability leading to the request for medical assistance in dying is to be recorded as the cause of death. ii. No reference to MAiD or the drugs administered for the purposes of MAiD should be included on the Medical Certificate of Death.

As Canada becomes a cautionary tale, with other nations recoiling from what our euthanasia regime has become, the government has been quite insistent that people killed by euthanasia should not be included in “cause of death” statistics. As the Sixth Annual Report on Medical Aid in Dying, published on November 28, 2025, states:

MAID is not classified as a cause of death by the World Health Organization, which sets international standards on data collection related to the classification of disease. As stated by the World Health Organization, a ‘cause of death’ is the disease or injury that initiated the train of events leading directly to death … MAID, by contrast, is a health service provided as part of end-of-life or complex care … For example, if a person suffering from advanced cancer chooses to receive MAID … the cause of death extracted from their death certificate for the purposes of vital statistics will be cancer. Accordingly, the number of MAID provisions should not be compared to cause of death statistics in Canada in order to determine the prevalence (the proportion of all decedents) nor to rank MAID as a cause of death.

But what of those in Canada who have been euthanized for partial blindness? For mental health struggles? Because they can’t access the care they need? Because of their disabilities? To claim that these Canadians died due to these conditions amounts to a cover-up, and an Official Lie. Historians generations hence will justifiably be confused to read on a death certificate of a disabled person that he or she died of a non-life-threatening disability and will conclude that the state wanted to cover up their killing by claiming something that is literally not true.

“Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as their rectified version,” Geoge Orwell wrote of the Ministry of Truth in 1984. “A great deal of time you were expected to make them up out of your head.” As the grim joke goes, Orwell wasn’t supposed to be a handbook.