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From left to right: Georges Buscemi of Quebec Life Coalition, Jack Fonseca, Josie Luetke, Pete Baklinski, and Brandan Tran of Campaign Life Coalition, and Aleš Primc of the Movement for Children & Families.

Georges Buscemi, President of Campagne Québec‑Vie — English reference version

Ladies and gentlemen, good day.

My name is Georges Buscemi. I am the president of Campagne Québec‑Vie.

In 2025, Quebec officially became the world champion of euthanasia. 6,268 Quebecers died by "medical assistance in dying" last year — 7.9% of all our deaths. Thirty‑six percent of all MAiD deaths in Canada take place in our province, even though we make up only twenty‑two percent of the Canadian population. And in March 2027, this "assistance" will be extended to people suffering solely from mental illness.

How did we get here?

Let me first recall two Quebec voices — voices that are not my own. Denise Bombardier, shortly before her death, was struck by the fact that the only political consensus that ever forms in Quebec forms around a law about death, and she put the question bluntly: "Is the weight of a culture of death pressing down on us?" Patrick Lagacé, writing in La Presse this past April, stated in black and white that Quebec is the "world champion" of MAiD, and he called this "a blind spot" that must be confronted.

Why us, and not the others?

In 2010, I submitted to the Quebec government's Special Commission on the Question of Dying with Dignity a brief titled A False Freedom: 50 Years of Euthanasia in Quebec. In it, I predicted a scenario: institutionalized despair, a vicious cycle, a society that would end up eliminating poverty by eliminating the poor, and illness by eliminating the sick. I was called an alarmist. Fifteen years later, I'll let you judge for yourselves.

But the real question runs deeper. The human being has two dimensions. A horizontal one — the body, matter, pleasure. And a vertical one — the soul, meaning, transcendence, God. Cut the vertical, and only the horizontal is left. And when only matter is left, life becomes a simple calculus of pleasure and pain. Pain then becomes the absolute evil. And when pain is the absolute evil, death becomes a form of care. The death of oneself, first. Then, by contagion, the death of others.

That, in plain words, is what has been happening in Quebec since the Quiet Revolution. We have amputated our own verticality. What we have left is a sad hedonism — one that flees suffering all the way to fleeing into death itself.

And the proof is right in front of us. In Lanaudière — a homogeneous region, aging, deeply de‑Christianized — MAiD now accounts for 13.4% of deaths. In Montreal, home to the Haitian, Lebanese, Filipino, Jewish, and Muslim communities, the rate drops to 4.7%. Same laws, same hospitals: nearly three times fewer deaths by injection wherever transcendence is still allowed to breathe.

I'll close with this. Quebec recently adopted Bill 9, one provision of which — already in force — bans prayer in public spaces. Next year, euthanasia will be extended to mental illness.

This is not a coincidence. It is the same hand at work. They are pushing out of the public square, and out of our collective consciousness, the one support that would allow a suffering person to give meaning to his suffering — God, prayer, transcendence. And because suffering has been stripped of meaning, the sufferer is eliminated.

Ladies and gentlemen: Quebec is the world's champion of euthanasia because it is becoming the world's champion at banishing God. Until this logic is reversed, the numbers will keep climbing.

Thank you.