TORONTO – In 2024, Canada recorded 326,779 deaths, slightly down from 327,546 in the previous year, marking a 0.2% decrease. Preliminary data from the Canadian Vital Statistics – Death database highlight that cancer and heart disease remain the leading causes of death, ranking first among both men and women across all provinces and territories. 

According to the statement published by Statistics Canada (here), cancer accounted for more than a quarter of all deaths, at 26.2%, followed by heart disease at 17.7%. Other significant causes among the top ten included accidents (6.2%), stroke (4.2%), chronic lower respiratory diseases (4.0%), influenza and pneumonia (2.3%), diabetes (2.1%), Alzheimer’s disease (1.6%), COVID-19 (1.5%), and liver disease (1.4%).

Deaths from influenza and pneumonia saw a significant rise in 2024, moving from the eighth to the sixth leading cause of death, with a 20% increase compared to the previous year. A total of 7,658 people died from these respiratory illnesses, with over half of the deaths occurring among those aged 85 and older. Pneumonia alone caused 6,445 deaths, exceeding the numbers recorded in 2018. During the COVID-19 pandemic, influenza deaths had dropped sharply, while pneumonia deaths fell to a lesser extent, likely due to social distancing measures and the so-called “mortality displacement,” whereby those most vulnerable to pneumonia and influenza were also the most affected by COVID-19.

Meanwhile, COVID-19-related deaths continued to decline. In 2024, 5,056 Canadians died from the coronavirus, a 36.6% decrease from the 7,978 deaths reported in 2023, dropping COVID-19 from the sixth to the ninth leading cause of death. The elderly population remained the most affected, with those aged 85 and older accounting for more than half of the deaths, while only 1.2% of COVID-19 deaths occurred among people under 50.

Dementia is an increasingly significant cause of death, indirectly responsible for 27,825 deaths in 2024, up 4.8% from 2023. If included in the top ten causes of death, dementia would rank third, just behind cancer and heart disease. Most dementia-related deaths occurred among those aged 85 and older, with women representing nearly two-thirds of cases due to their longer life expectancy and biological factors.

Despite increases in certain causes of death, 2024 marked the second consecutive year of improvement in mortality rates across all age groups, following the peaks observed in 2021 and 2022 due to the pandemic. This improvement is also reflected in life expectancy at birth, which rose from 81.68 years in 2023 to 82.16 years in 2024, nearly reaching pre-pandemic 2019 levels (82.22 years).

One last figure not included in the Statistics Canada report is deaths from medically assisted suicide (euthanasia). According to the annual “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAID) report released by the Canadian government, there were 16,499 assisted deaths in Canada in 2024, representing about 5.1% of all deaths in the country, marking a 6.9% increase compared to 2023. At this rate, medically assisted deaths risk becoming one of the leading causes of death in Canada.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash