Problems continue at Vital Statistics

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This article was published 01/06/2021 (1586 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Delays at the Manitoba Vital Statistics Agency are causing major headaches among some professions in the province.

Earlier this year, the Sun reported that lawyers and funeral services were experiencing delays of up to six months waiting for the agency to send them birth, death and marriage certificates.

On Monday, Manitoba Bar Association president Ellen McCarville told the Sun by phone that the problem has only gotten worse. For example, she said she has yet to receive a marriage certificate that she filed for on Oct. 24, 2020.

“We haven’t really gotten an answer from Vital Stats as to why,” she said. “It’s my understanding that at some point, they’ve been revamping their physical offices, so I’m not sure if that’s caused part of the issue or if they’re revamping physical offices to try to update things and have it progress. In any event, we haven’t seen the fruit of that labour yet.”

According to McCarville, the bar association is currently drafting a letter to Finance Minister Scott Fielding, whose department operates the agency, to ask him to address the issues. There’s also talk of banding together with the Manitoba Funeral Service Association to work co-operatively to solve a problem that’s affecting both professions.

Apparently paying an extra $35 for the documents to be rushed does speed things up, but McCarville points out that the service should be used for documents that truly need to be rushed. If everyone pays for the rush service, it’ll just slow the whole system down.

Whatever is causing the delays has also prevented the Sun from definitively debunking a conspiracy theory.

In 2020, a document was circulated on social media purporting to show that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of deaths in Manitoba had actually dropped.

It was received through a freedom of information and protection of privacy request filed with the provincial government, showing that there were fewer deaths in 2020 than in the past few years.

While some took this as proof that COVID-19 and the pandemic surrounding it were actually fake, it was an incomplete document.

The document did not list death numbers for the last three months of 2020 because it was filed before the end of the year. People had not stopped dying and many deaths had not yet been reported.

Since that document started circulating, the Sun has been attempting to get the complete number of deaths in Manitoba for 2020 to no avail.

In April, Statistics Canada posted on its website that it would be updating death statistics for the previous year in May.

Once the organization’s files and tables were updated, Manitoba was left as the only province that didn’t have death numbers reported for December 2020.

Earlier this week, the Sun reached out to Statistics Canada, which stated that delays in reporting have been country-wide during the pandemic.

“In Canada, death data are collected by the provincial and territorial vital statistical offices and their capacity to provide these data to Statistics Canada in a timely manner varies greatly,” an email from a Statistics Canada spokesperson stated.

“More importantly, their capacity may also have changed as a result of the pandemic itself. For some of the more recent weeks, insufficient data have been reported by some provinces and territories to produce adequate estimates of adjusted and excess mortality.”

Since Statistics Canada appears to be waiting for it to send the information, The Sun reached out to the Manitoba Vital Statistics Agency last Thursday in an attempt to get hold of the final death statistics for 2020, but the agency has yet to respond.

Despite that missing month of data, it is still unlikely that Manitoba experienced fewer deaths in 2020 than in previous years.

In all of 2019, there were 11,155 deaths in Manitoba. By the end of November 2020, there were 10,560 deaths — just 595 fewer.

That gap closes even further when you consider that more than 300 COVID-19 related deaths were reported by the provincial government in December 2020, when the second wave was hitting Manitoba hard.

That makes for a difference of less than three per cent, and that’s not even counting non-COVID-related deaths in that final month of 2020.

Even if Manitoba somehow ends up with fewer deaths in 2020 compared to previous years, data for British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec and the entire country as well all show noticeable increases in the number of deaths during 2020.

Here are the number of deaths in Canada for each of the past five years:

• 2016: 271,305

• 2017: 277,060

• 2018: 282,915

• 2019: 283,125

• 2020: 305,350

During the first year of the pandemic, the number of deaths for the country jumped by approximately 22,000, and more deaths will be added to that total once Manitoba’s apparent data backlog is processed.

While more populous provinces like Ontario and Quebec saw increases in deaths in the thousands and less populous provinces like Saskatchewan saw an increase in the hundreds, there were increases across the board.

The wait continues for the exact details for Manitoba, but 2020 was undeniably a deadlier year for Canadians than the years that preceded it.

» cslark@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @ColinSlark