Canadian mortality microdata

Question

Yet another researcher is looking for microdata from Canadian registration of deaths records, or whatever they are called now. All years from 1984 to 2004 would be appreciated.

The variables needed (and that were available at least in the 1980s) are: year and month of death; province, county, locality of residence; marital status; sex; age; year of birth; place of birth; province, county, locality of death; ethnic origin; occupation; industry; place of death (hospital, sanatorium, etc.); autopsy; cause of death, nature of injury (International classification of disease, ICD-9); birthplace of mother, father.

I am aware that not all these variables are consistently filled in by all provincial vital statistics agencies, but for those that are, the info would be great.

The alternative, I suppose, is to use again US mortality records, which are fairly readily available.

Answer

Statistics Canada does not disseminate vital statistics information as a PUMF. Aggregated statistics at the Canadian level is all that is available for detailed tables.

Vital statistics are administrative data (meaning: they are collected by another government department and then remitted to Statistics Canada for publishing). The owners of the data (provincial ministries of vital statistics) still own the "rights" to the data and do not allow any release of the information by Statistics Canada to other users.

STC's Health Division advised that every single provincial ministry would need to be contacted in order to release the data. The rumour is that requests have been pending for over two years and the outcome is not looking favourable.

Most unfortunately, your user may need to do as you describe - use American data.