Good morning.
According to Statistics Canada data from late last year, a child born in Canada can expect to live to be 81.3 years of age, the third year of shrinking life expectancy since 82.3 years in 2019.
As Globe health columnist André Picard wrote at the time, a one-year loss in life expectancy is a big deal: It’s only the second time this sharp a drop has happened in Canada in the past century. For decades, Canadians’ life expectancy has climbed: 71 in 1960, 75 in 1980, 79 in 2000, and 82.3 in 2019.
That context is necessary to convey just how shocking the numbers are in a report released by the First Nations Health Authority in B.C. last week.
While life expectancy for Canadians in general is measured in changes of months, status First Nations peoples in British Columbia experienced a six-year decline in life expectancy between 2017 and 2021.
According to the data in the report, the life expectancy at birth for a status First Nations person in 2021 was 67.2 years, down from 73.3 years in 2017.
“Clearly, this life expectancy data is just, it’s gut wrenching,” Dr. Danièle Behn Smith, deputy provincial health officer for Indigenous health, said at a news conference last week.
Health officials in Alberta released similarly terrible figures in a report in April, 2023. That report, from the Indigenous Primary Health Care Advisory Panel, found that First Nations’ life expectancy dropped to 63.2 years in 2021 as compared with 70.3 years in 2019. It was the first time in 20 years that life expectancy for that group had dropped.
“This places Indigenous people in Alberta in alignment with countries like Niger, Angola and Afghanistan and similar to life expectancy witnessed in Canada during the Great Depression in the 1930s,” the report said.
The time period reflects the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic in both provinces.
In British Columbia, the pandemic was responsible for 258 COVID-related deaths among First Nations people between 2020 and April 1, 2022. In B.C. as a whole, about 3,002 people died of the disease in that time frame, meaning that First Nations people made up just over 8 per cent of those who died. Their representation within the population over all is about 6 per cent.
But the biggest factor in both provinces for the drop in life expectancy is the toxic drug crisis. In B.C. last year, First Nations people had a death rate from toxic drugs more than six times that of the general population. In Alberta, the rate of opioid poisonings was seven times higher last year.
The B.C. report is a follow-up to an initial study published in 2021 examining 22 health and wellness indicators, including rates of graduation, hospitalization, serious injuries, youth suicides, mortality and diabetes. The FNHA plans to track these indicators between 2020 and 2030.
The report also highlights some improvements in other indicators. The proportion of students who complete high school within eight years of starting Grade 8 has improved by 4.3 per cent among Indigenous students. Additionally, the infant mortality rate among First Nations people has decreased.
But as André wrote last year, the life expectancy measure, while somewhat complicated and frequently misunderstood, is an important indicator and in Alberta and British Columbia, an ominous one for First Nations people.
Life expectancy is “not so much a prediction of how long an individual can expect to live, but rather a crude measure of a country’s health, the only real measure of overall population health we have.”
This is the weekly British Columbia newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.