Lowered Expectations

Drops in life expectancy a worrisome trend

Today A Larger Scale features a shorter post on a trend toward shorter lives. You can expect something longer in your inbox this weekend with an excerpt from A Healthy Future.

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Adam Toy at Global News in Calgary recently tweeted the latest Statistics Canada life expectancy numbers. If you scroll over the chart below, you’ll see the average age at death of people in Canada and in each Canadian province by year from 1980 to 2021.

The long trend here is incredible. Since I was a kid in the 1980s, the average life span of Canadians has increased by six years, seven if we return to the pre-COVID peak. Through economic prosperity and incredible advances in public health and medicine, we are living longer and healthier lives. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that, with the exception of Quebec, which seems to have had the briefest drop and a quick rebound, and Nova Scotia and New Brunswick which held steady, every province saw their life expectancy drop from 2019 to 2021. Several saw those numbers drop by over a year. Those regional dips added up to a total decrease of over six months for the entire country.

Then there’s the worse news: Saskatchewan. My home province was once among the healthiest. In the early 1990s, Saskatchewan people were living longer than anyone else in the country. Since then, as the rest of the country improved, Saskatchewan has stagnated, steadily drifting toward the bottom of the pack. One of the country’s worst COVID responses, a raging opioid poisoning epidemic, and the highest HIV rates in the country, among a myriad of other health problems, have left us dead last (or dead first, depending on how you look at it).

Life expectancy in Saskatchewan:

• dropped by two whole years between 2019 and 2021

• is the lowest in the country, and the lowest it’s been this century

• is a full three years below the national average, with Saskatchewan the only province in Canada with a life expectancy less than 79 years of age

Hidden in this drop in the quantity of years lived is the concurrent drop in quality, the years of illness, disability and suffering. These numbers represent an acute-on-chronic failure to address the upstream factors that keep people healthy or to respond effectively when they’re ill. The past trend shows that we can turn this around, good public policy and good health care can deliver longer, more enjoyable lives. I can only hope this starkly presented data can serve as a wake-up call in Saskatchewan and a warning to the entire country of what happens when governments neglect what matters most: the health and wellbeing of the people they’ve been elected to serve.

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