We Still Have No Idea How Many People in Canada Have Died of Fentanyl Overdoses

As health officials across the country scramble to get a handle on the deadly opioid crisis, federal health minister Jane Philpott issued a strong condemnation of the woefully inadequate statistics available on opioid overdoses in Canada.

“It’s frankly shameful that I can’t tell right now how many deaths [there] have been over the country this year,” she said in Parliament on Tuesday in a response to a question from VICE News. “I would like real-time updated information on how many overdoses there are, how many deaths there are.”

This was echoed earlier this week by Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne when she admitted that her province is trailing behind when it comes to tracking fentanyl-related deaths, something that is plaguing the whole country.

“It’s time to make sure we have all the information in the most timely way possible and we don’t have that at this point,” Wynne said in response to a question from a Global News reporter. “So whether it’s appointing someone, or doing something else, we need to have that information in a timely manner.”

Still, Wynne did not offer specifics on how or when that was going to be fixed. Philpott has said her department is working with data-collecting agencies to come up with a solution, although she did not provide further details.

As hundreds of Canadians have already died of a fentanyl-related overdose this year, and the tone of government press conferences get more ominous, the reality is that Canada does not have an accurate picture of exactly how many people have fatally overdosed from the synthetic opioid.

And according to data obtained by VICE News from provincial and territorial health ministries, only BC, Alberta, Nunavut, and the Yukon have current data on overdose deaths linked to fentanyl.

The issue is especially pronounced in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, which won’t release its final statistics on the matter for 2015 until 2017.

While Ontario has, for years, been slammed for not taking the opioid crisis seriously, addictions experts and advocates say that, without proper data, there’s no way they can adequately tackle the problem.

“We’re in the middle of an opioid crisis, the worst drug safety crisis in Canadian history,” Michael Parkinson, coordinator for the Waterloo Region Crime Prevention Council, told VICE News earlier this year. “Programming should be based on good data, good evidence so you can craft appropriate interventions and in the absence of any interest in collecting good data, it becomes much more difficult on a population health level to design those interventions.”

“If we have to declare a state of emergency so we can count the dead bodies in real time, then so be it,” he concluded.

In response to a striking rise in fentanyl overdoses, and because Health Canada doesn’t track the opioid crisis nationally, British Columbia and Alberta have recently revved up efforts to keep current data on those overdose deaths and emergency room visits. BC declared a state of emergency over opioid deaths earlier this year and is essentially collecting overdose death data in real-time. As a result, it can predict that around 800 people will die from fentanyl overdoses in that province alone. Alberta is releasing similar data every couple of months, and has seen more than 400 overdose deaths related to fentanyl over the last two years.

The lack of national data prompted the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse to compile overdose death data from provincial and territorial coroners and health examiners. In 2015, the group released a bulletin that found at least 655 overdose deaths caused by or related to fentanyl from 2009 to 2014, although much of the data is as recent as 2013.

That report urged health authorities “collaborate to standardize information reported on for drug poisoning deaths.”

Until last Saturday, the most recent data available on fentanyl-related deaths in Ontario was from 2014—two years out of date. Preliminary data from 2015 was released this weekend, showed that the drug killed 162 people that year—the highest number the province has seen yet—and 36 others who had combined the substance with alcohol.

The two other jurisdictions with numbers on opioid-related deaths from this year are Nunavut and the Yukon. With Nunavut reporting zero and the Yukon reporting one opioid-related death this year. All other provinces and territories either did not reply to requests from VICE News, or could not provide 2016 data.

The data available for 2015 is slightly better, with Nova Scotia, BC, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan, Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and the Yukon providing numbers, in addition to Ontario’s preliminary figures.

Quebec’s health department could provide not current data, and eventually stopped responding to follow-up requests from VICE News. The Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse found that there were 102 fentanyl-related deaths in the province from 2009 to 2013.

Health Canada will host its first opioid summit late November, alongside Ontario’s health minister.

With files from Michael Robinson and Justin Ling.

Follow Rachel Browne on Twitter.