The Economics and Statistics Division maintains archives of previous publications for accountability purposes, but makes no updates to keep these documents current with the latest data revisions from Statistics Canada. As a result, information in older documents may not be accurate. Please exercise caution when referring to older documents. For the latest information and historical data, please contact the individual listed to the right.
<--- Return to Archive
For additional information relating to this article, please contact:
March 09, 2023DEATH COUNTS AND EXCESS MORTALITY, DECEMBER 2022 Statistics Canada has provided provisional information on deaths in Canada up to December 31, 2022. This includes deaths attributable to all causes; fluctuations from one week to the next may be attributable to many different causes of death. The data does not include all deaths that occurred during the reference period.
Most provinces have not reported their results up to November 5; only Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia have reported to this date. Information is not complete for recent months in:
Newfoundland and Labrador (to December 24, 2022)
Prince Edward Island (to December 24, 2022)
Nova Scotia (to November 26, 2022)
New Brunswick (to November 5, 2022)
Ontario (to September 24, 2022)
Manitoba (to February 5, 2022)
Saskatchewan (to October 8, 2022)
With limited information from several provinces, national estimates are available up to November 5, 2022.
Statistics Canada cautions that "...even without a pandemic, there is always some year-to-year variation in the number of deaths in a given week. As such, the number of expected deaths should fall within a certain range of values. There is evidence of excess mortality when weekly deaths are consistently higher than the expected number, but especially when they exceed the range of what is expected over several consecutive weeks."
Nova Scotia reported significant excess mortality above the upper bound of expected deaths throughout November, following intermittent weeks of adjusted deaths in excess of the upper bounds for expected mortality.
Nationally, there were several consecutive weeks of adjusted deaths above the upper bound of expected deaths through the summer and early fall. In recent data, adjusted deaths in Canada have fallen below the upper bound of expected deaths. Adjusted deaths have been above the upper bound of expected deaths over multiple weeks of recent data in: Nova Scotia, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia. There have been shorter periods of adjusted deaths in excess of the upper bound of expected deaths from recent data in the other Atlantic provinces. Neither Ontario nor Saskatchewan have reported adjusted deaths above the upper bound for expected deaths in their most recent results (though they are lagged by about 3 months). Manitoba has not updated its data beyond early 2022.
Source: Statistics Canada. Table 13-10-0768-01 Weekly death counts, by age group and sex; Table 13-10-0784-01 Adjusted number of deaths, expected number of deaths and estimates of excess mortality, by week
<--- Return to Archive
