Daily Smokers (percentage of adult population)

Ever-increasing taxes on tobacco, anti-smoking campaigns in the media, health warnings, and graphic images of smoking-related diseases on cigarette packs have helped to reduce smoking in Canada over the past few decades.

But as the smoke clears in Southern Canada, things aren't getting better in the North. In some communities in Northern Quebec, for example, the share of smokers is 10 times higher than it is in communities in Southern British Columbia.

More than a quarter of adults in northeastern B.C., Northern Manitoba, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Côte-Nord, Nord-du-Québec, and Northern Newfoundland and Labrador today are daily smokers. More than one-third of adults in Northern Saskatchewan are daily smokers. And in Nunavut and Nunavik, more than half the adult population lights up daily.

If smoking rates aren't reduced, smoking-related illnesses and deaths will take a heavy toll on Northerners, and government health-care budgets in Northern regions (which are already on the rise) may well go up in smoke.

Note: North-South boundary line is based on health regions, rather than on census divisions as in previous maps.
Source: The Conference Board of Canada.

Methodology

Data in an Excel spreadsheet were obtained from Statistics Canada's 2010 Health Profile (Catalogue No. 82-228-XWE, Ottawa, released June 15, 2010). Values from the "Current smoker, daily" field were imported into a geographic information system (ArcGIS) where they were classified as "< 25 per cent" or "25 per cent +." Data were mapped to the nearest whole number, and the values for health regions in the North falling in the higher category were labelled.

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

The health region Terres-Cries-de-la-Baie-James in Northern Quebec comprises a number of small, geographically dispersed communities whose data is not visible when presented on a national map at the scale used in this series. To make the data visible, this health region was therefore merged with Nord-du-Québec, which surrounds most of the Terres-Cries-de-la-Baie-James communities. Given that smoking rates within First Nations populations are higher than the national average, this probably results in a lower-than-actual smoking rate for Cree communities in Northern Quebec.¹

No data were available for Nunavik (Northern Quebec), so the value 60 per cent was assigned to this region based on the findings of a study outlined in the report Qanuippitaa? How Are We? Tobacco Use. The report states that "at the time of the survey [2004], 70 per cent of Nunavik Inuit reported daily smoking." The rate was arbitrarily reduced to 60 per cent to account for the fact that not all residents of Nunavik are Inuit and smoking rates among non-Inuit are lower. Researchers and journalists reporting on the actual smoking rate in this region should refer to the original study and other research, rather than quoting the number here, which was roughly interpolated for national comparative purposes only.

Many of the data points in the file received from Statistics Canada are marked with the letter "E" to indicate "use with caution." Researchers and journalists are cautioned to view the data as representative of national-level differences, rather than as statistically valid smoking rates for individual health regions.

Please refer to the Methodology section for the map in An Accident Waiting to Happen for a description of the mapping of health regions in this series, especially with respect to Statistics Canada regional data groupings in Northern Saskatchewan and Northern Manitoba.

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.

1  Health Canada, "First Nations, Inuit, and Aboriginal Health: Tobacco."