“As life expectancy plummets in Canada, a new government report claims “unspecified causes” have become the fifth leading cause of death in the country after cancer, heart disease, COVID-19 and accidents.
According to the Statistics Canada report, “unspecified causes” in 2022 passed strokes, aneurysms, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, asthma, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, Alzheimer’s and suicide as causes of death.
Statistics Canada, also known as StatCan, released the report on Nov. 27 in The Daily, the agency’s online news bulletin.
The report generated a slew of nearly identical headlines — provided by Canada’s national news service — in Canada’s leading newspapers along the lines of this one in the Toronto Sun: “Life expectancy for Canadians fell for third straight year in 2022, StatCan says,” followed by the subhead: “More people died of COVID-19 in 2022 than in any other year since the pandemic began, report says.”