In February 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Carter v. Canada that parts of the Criminal Code would need to change to comply with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The parts that prohibited physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia would no longer be valid. The Supreme Court gave the government until June 6, 2016, to create a new law. In response, the federal government introduced legislation that allows doctors or nurse practitioners to provide eligible adults with "medical assistance in dying," either by directly administering a drug that causes death, or by prescribing such a drug for the patient to self-administer.

This legislation received Royal Assent on June 17, 2016..

These grievous affronts to the dignity of human life from beginning to natural end are never morally justified. The legal permission now granted to these practices does not change the moral law. The teaching of the Church on these matters is clear. Euthanasia “is a grave violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person.”  Since suicide, objectively speaking, is a gravely immoral act, it follows that “to concur with the intention of another person to commit suicide and to help in carrying it out through so-called "assisted suicide,” means to co-operate in, and at times to be the actual perpetrator of, an injustice which can never be excused.” (Cf. St. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, nn. 65-66)