Manitoba still only province not to provide overdose death data

Despite last year’s promise, the Manitoba government has yet to fulfill its commitment of releasing overdose death data in a more timely manner.

The Public Health Agency of Canada’s latest quarterly report on opioid deaths, which was published in March and includes data from January to September 2023, shows Manitoba was the only province to not submit data. The former Progressive Conservative government faced scrutiny for consistently being an outlier.

NDP Addictions Minister Bernadette Smith said the province is working on it.

“This is something that’s very important to our government, to make sure that we are getting timely data out there,” Smith said. “We are still committed to that, it is going to take some time … we are a new government and we are working as fast as we can to get that done.”

Smith said her office is collaborating with the Justice Department, which oversees the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the body that tracks the data, to improve the speed of reporting. She said her department has regular conversations with the medical examiner’s office.

Manitoba currently posts monthly preliminary overdose death data to the provincial website — a move undertaken by the PC government last year amid pressure to be more transparent. However, the data is consistently several months out of date and the figures available currently are only up to December 2023.

In December, Smith said her government aimed to share opioid death data with the public health agency prior to the quarterly report. This week, Smith said she couldn’t commit to sharing data for the next report in June. She reiterated that improving reporting remains a work in progress.

When the NDP took power, they tasked a working group with improving the timeliness of overdose death data reporting. Smith said the group continues to meet monthly.

Kathryn Braun, director of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, said in an email that her office remains committed to sharing important drug death information, noting it already posts preliminary data on the province’s website.

“However the Public Health Agency of Canada requires a more formal disclosure and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, as part of the working group, is currently working on developing a system that can provide that kind of data,” Braun said.

Last year, the Free Press revealed that Manitoba’s reliance on paper files to record overdose deaths may have been a factor in not getting data to the public health agency sooner.

katrina.clarke@freepress.mb.ca