In a recent health report article, researchers from Statistics Canada announced that life expectancy (LE) and health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE) figures are now available for 1,227 census subdivisions (CSDs) in Canada. These are municipalities or areas treated as municipal equivalents by provincial and territorial governments. “To date, no study has analyzed LE and HALE at the municipal level,” they write.
Entitled Estimated municipal life expectancy and health-adjusted life expectancy in Canada, 2019 and 2020, the report looks at death and population counts from January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2020. They say LE measures the average number or remaining years of life, while HALE measures the average number of remaining years of life in good health.
Across all CSDs, the medial LE at birth was 84.1 years for females and 79.6 years for males. “These notably estimates align with national-level data published by Statistics Canada for 2019 and 2020,” they write. “CSDs most likely to be representative of the median LE at birth were the cities of Edmonton, Alberta and Hamilton, Ontario for females and the cities of Gatineau, Quebec and Kitchener, Ontario for males.” In general, women had a higher LE than men, with an average gap of 4.5 years.
Focusing on HALE, the median estimates were 70.8 years for females and 68.3 years for males. They say the CSDs most likely to be representative of the median for females were the cities of Maple Ridge and Abbotsford, British Columbia. For males, the CSDs most likely to be representative of the median were Norfolk County and Lakeshore, Ontario.
“In general, CSDs with higher LE at birth also had higher HALE at birth,” Statistics Canada notes.
City size and education levels
To better understand the differences across CSDs, the report examined some contributing factors. “LE at birth and HALE at birth are positively correlated with population size and educational attainment,” the authors write in the summary of their findings.
On the subject, the report elaborates: “The correlation analyses suggest that postsecondary education exhibits the strongest positive correlations with LE, HALE, and the proportion of life years in full health at birth, and that these correlations were greater for males than females.” This finding, they write, aligns with past studies on the variability of these three health indicators in Canadian and international contexts.
“LE and HALE were positively correlated with population size and the average after-tax income of economic families,” they add. However, the report notes that the same was not observed for the proportion of life years in full health.
According to Statistics Canada, these findings are important for understanding how municipal contexts may influence LE and HALE through various factors—such as housing; land use and green space; local social, economic and demographic characteristics; and the initiatives of local health care and public health agencies.
