Life expectancy is stagnating or decreasing across North America. Except in Quebec.
After being weighed down by the pandemic, life expectancy has started to increase again in Quebec, to now exceed the 2020 level.
For Quebec women, this average lifespan has now reached 85 years. This is one year more than the Canadian average. Among men, it reaches 81.3 years, compared to 79.3 years in the “rest of Canada” in general.
How can we explain this altogether exceptional performance?
If you ask Pierre Lavoie, a great promoter of “healthy lifestyle habits” and prevention, he will tell you that the “Quebec model” has been more successful in conveying these values which influence longevity.
Quebec, for example, has seen the most dramatic decline in tobacco use in Canada in a generation. But it’s not because we smoke less than everywhere else: it’s because we were the champions of inhaled nicotine before getting closer to the average.
It is not collective wealth that explains this Canadian first place – the GDP per capita in Quebec is below average.
It’s hard to pinpoint just one thing, but we must be doing something right! A few things in the plural, actually…
If you ask demographer Nadine Ouellette, of the University of Montreal, she will tell you that it is mainly because fewer people die from overdoses in Quebec than anywhere else in North America.
Which is also, indirectly, an indication of a form of good medical, social or pharmaceutical practice…
But Quebec is far from being spared, as colleague Philippe Mercure brilliantly illustrated last year.
The 541 people who died from overdoses in Quebec in 2022 are more numerous than all the victims of road accidents that year. Nevertheless: there were 2,501 in Ontario, 2,342 in British Columbia (per capita, that’s eight times more), 1,499 in Alberta (six times more per capita).
Will we resist this continental wave or will it only break later?
The nine overdoses reported on Sunday in downtown Montreal made noise because they quickly mobilized emergency services.
But to use the title of Philippe Mercure’s file, for the most part, this epidemic is “silent”, striking everywhere in Quebec, and in all environments.
Series Painkiller on Netflix tells the American origin of this epidemic which started in the laboratories of Purdue, author of OxyContin. Result: for the first time in contemporary history, life expectancy is falling significantly in the richest country in the world.
PHOTO TOBY TALBOT, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
Bottle of OxyContin, from the manufacturer Purdue
According to the most recent data from Public Health in the United States, 107,000 people died from an overdose – mainly opioids – in 2022 in this country. This is more than twice the number of suicides (nearly 50,000, up 30% over 20 years); more than twice the number of road accident deaths (45,000). And more than four times the number of deaths by homicide (26,000), yet the highest in industrialized countries.
After a gigantic jump of almost 10 years since the 1970s, American life expectancy has fallen by more than two years in recent years, to 76.3 years.
The decline is dramatic and it is attributable to one factor, explains professor Nadine Ouellette: deaths from “accidental poisoning”. Either by excess consumption or by unintentional consumption of a lethal substance – it only takes a few grains of fentanyl to reach the lethal dose.
The situation is more complicated in the United States, due to the accumulation of all that sociologists call “deaths by despair”, which includes everything I have just listed (suicides, homicides, poisonings). , accidents, etc.) and bears witness to the crumbling of the “American dream”. But when it comes to overdoses, the Canadian provinces followed “the same timetable” as the United States, just a little shifted in time.
Demographer Nadine Ouellette has just started a research project that focuses specifically on the gains and declines in life expectancy in Canada since 2010.
The two main causes of death by far remain cancer and cardiovascular diseases. But advances in medicine and changes in lifestyle habits have increased life expectancy… until the turn of the 2010s. “Since then, in different provinces, either it no longer increases at the same rate, or it stagnates, or it goes backwards altogether.
“Quebec has remained on the fringes of these trends, and this is why, for the first time, Quebec men have the best life expectancy in the country.
“Quebec always tends to stand out for cultural reasons. There are many drawbacks to life expectancy, which is only an average. »
The data probably underestimates the extent of overdoses in Quebec. And even at this relatively “low” official level, the phenomenon is dramatic.
“These are all preventable deaths,” says Nadine Ouellette.
How to prevent them? By making these drugs identifiable, by bringing them out of hiding, by “destigmatizing” them.
In the meantime, despite the staggering number of coffins piling up, the epidemic is largely invisible.