Updating the Canadian Mortality Data in the Human Mortality Database and in the Canadian Human Mortality Database
October 2025
Author
Magali Barbieri, Ph.D.
Co-Director, Human Mortality Database
Director, U.S. Mortality Database
University of California, Berkeley
Background
First published in 2002 and continuously updated since then, the Human Mortality Database (HMD, www.mortality.org) is a unique open-access collection of detailed mortality and population data for 41 countries with complete and reliable vital registration and census data, which includes Canada. The project is a collaboration between the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley, the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany, and the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris. It is led by Dr. Magali Barbieri at the University of California and Dr. Dmitri Jdanov at the MPIDR. The HMD contains calculations of death rates and life tables for national populations, as well as the original input data used for constructing those tables and extensive documentation. Regarded as a gold standard for mortality information, it is a major source of data for the actuarial profession, researchers, journalists, policy analysts, and international organizations such as the United Nations and World Health Organization. More than 75,000 users have registered to access the HMD series and over 7,000 publications (including over 5,500 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals) cite the HMD as one of their primary data sources.
Building from the experience of the HMD, researchers in the Department of Demography at the Université de Montréal, namely Pr. Robert Bourbeau and Dr. Nadine Ouellette, have developed a similar repository of mortality indicators for the 10 Canadian provinces and three territories. This database is called the Canadian Human Mortality Database (or Base de données sur la longévité canadienne, http://www.bdlc.umontreal.ca). It was constructed in close collaboration with the HMD team at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) as it strictly follows the HMD methodological protocol. The CHMD was first published in 2004 and has been updated periodically up to 2014 by
Pr. Bourbeau and Dr. Ouellette. Given new constraints at the Université de Montréal, the HMD team at UCB was asked to take over the data extraction, computational work, and verification of results to further update the CHMD. A contribution from the Canadian Institute of Actuaries in 2018, renewed in 2020 and again in 2021 and in 2023, has enabled the collaboration to go through to update both the Canadian series in the HMD and the Canadian Mortality Database. Using revised data for 2011 and new data for 2012-2016, the UCB team carried out a first update of the CHMD in 2018, and then additional ones the following years to extend the data series up to the year 2021 for the last update. The latest contribution, through a joint partnership between the Canadian Institute of Actuaries and the Society of Actuaries Research Institute, has allowed the Canadian series of the HMD and the CHMD to further include the years 2022 and 2023 (as well as revised data for 2017-2021).
The Canadian mortality series in the HMD and in the CHMD rely on the same sources of data, namely vital statistics and annual population estimates from Statistics Canada, and they involve the same methods protocol (as described here: https://mortality.org/File/GetDocument/Public/Docs/MethodsProtocolV6.pdf). An agreement between each province and territory registrar and the Université de Montréal had allowed Pr. Bourbeau and Ouellette to obtain from Statistics Canada the detailed data necessary to construct the initial mortality series (i.e., death counts by province/territory, calendar year, sex, age at last birthday, and birth cohort), which was renewed in the Spring of 2025 for an additional five years.
Material
Updating Canadian Mortality Data - National & Human Mortality Databases
Prior Updates
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