Life Expectancy at Birth

By international standards, a child born in Canada this year can expect to live a good, long life. Whatever the method used to predict life expectancy, Canada always ranks in or near the top 10 list of countries for this indicator, with an average life expectancy of about 81 years. According to the Conference Board's How Canada Performs rankings, this puts Canada in seventh place, behind such countries as Japan, Switzerland, and Australia, but ahead of the United States.

But Canada's national average life expectancy masks enormous regional differences. Canadians living in the North cannot expect to live as long as those living in the South. Contributing reasons likely include poor living conditions, a lack of primary health care, and higher accident rates. As the map shows, there are only a handful of health regions in Southern Canada where people would not expect to celebrate their 78th birthday; conversely, there are few regions in Canada's North where people can expect to live that long.

A child born in Nunavik in Northern Quebec has a life expectancy of only 66.7 years. If Nunavik were a country, it would place 133rd in world rankings for life expectancy--behind such countries as Uzbekistan, Tonga, and Iraq.

Source: The Conference Board of Canada.

Methodology

Please refer to the map An Accident Waiting to Happen for a detailed description of the definition of Canada's North according to health region boundaries.

Data in an Excel spreadsheet were obtained from Statistics Canada's Health Profile, June 2010 (Catalogue No. 82-228-XWE [Ottawa: Statistics Canada, June 15, 2010]). Values from the "Life expectancy at birth" field were imported into a geographic information system (ArcGIS), where they were classified as "less than 75 years," "75 to 78 years," and "greater than 78 years." The data were mapped and the values for all Northern health regions were labelled.

The SORT function in Excel was used to prepare the two tables illustrating highest and lowest life expectancies by health region in Canada.

Data were not available for Prince Edward Island, so it was merged with the nearest adjacent health region (Region 1, New Brunswick). Similarly, no data were available for York Regional (adjacent to the City of Toronto), so its boundaries were merged with those of the City of Toronto.

About the Series

Here, the North is a bi-weekly series researched, written, and produced by The Conference Board of Canada's Centre for the North. The series is designed to illustrate similarities and differences--between Canada's North and South, and between Northern regions--in keeping with the Centre's mandate to provide policy-directed research to decision makers.

This issue of Here, the North was researched and written by Peter Wilson.