Capitalism is Leaving Us Poorer, Sicker, and Dying Younger
New data from Statistics Canada reports that life expectancy dropped in Canada for the third straight year in 2022, while deaths increased. Average life expectancy in the country dropped from 81.6 years in 2021 to 81.3 years, with a more prominent decline among females than males. Nearly 335,000 people in Canada died last year, a 7.1% increase from the previous year.
The chief culprit is COVID-19. Deaths from COVID in 2022 reached almost 20,000, the highest number since the start of the pandemic, up from around 15,000 in 2021. StatCan researchers noted that the increase in COVID deaths “may in part be due to the exposure to new highly transmissible COVID-19 variants and the gradual return to normalcy (e.g., reduced restrictions and masking requirements).” Yes, it’s no surprise more people died of COVID last year when there’s still a pandemic while the ruling class abandoned all COVID-related public-health measures, and lied that the pandemic is over to ensure a return to “normalcy”—meaning the maintenance of short-term capitalist profits.
The StatCan report continues:
The proportion of COVID-19 deaths among older Canadians aged 65 years and older rose to 91.4% in 2022, approaching early pandemic levels. This increase was largely felt by seniors aged 80 years and older, who experienced a 78.2% increase in COVID-19 deaths from 2021 to 2022. In contrast, deaths due to COVID-19 decreased to 8.6% for those younger than 65 years in 2022. […]
In 2022, the rate of COVID-19 deaths increased across all Canadian regions, except the Prairies (i.e., Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta). The largest increase was in Atlantic Canada, where the rate of COVID-19 deaths in 2022 (59.5 deaths per 100,000 population) was more than seven times higher than in 2021 (8.3 deaths). In 2022, the rate of COVID-19 deaths increased by 38.3% to 54.5 deaths in Central Canada (i.e., Quebec and Ontario) and by 29.6% to 41.6 deaths in Western Canada (i.e., British Columbia, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut).
While COVID deaths may have decreased among people younger than 65, incidents of heart attacks and strokes linked to COVID are on the rise among young people. A study last year by the Smidt Heart Institute at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles found significant rises in heart attack deaths among people between the ages of 25 and 44 since the start of the pandemic, and that COVID-19 surges are linked to a rise in heart attacks. The aforementioned StatCan report also found that deaths due to influenza and pneumonia are on the rise, increasing by 45.4% between 2021 and 2022.
Again, it’s no surprise that people are getting sick more often and dying younger. We’ve been told we have to “learn to live with COVID”, a disease that has been shown to weaken our immune system and cause significant harm to major organs. Anecdotally, people I know seem to get sick far more often now. That’s what happens when society’s rulers allow a deadly and debilitating virus to spread unchecked among the population. Surprise: it turns out being infected with a coronavirus multiple times each year is going to have a negative impact on people’s health.
Not only are people sicker and dying younger; they’re also getting poorer. An Angus Reid poll last March found half of Canadians said they were worse off than a year before. Almost half of Canadians are living paycheque to paycheque. The gap between rich and poor is increasing at a record pace, with the poorest 40% of Canadians controlling less than 3% of the country’s net wealth. Millennials are poorer than their parents in Canada and the United States—the first time in U.S. history that a generation has been poorer than their parents. Rest assured that the economic pain is only going to get worse, after central banks raised interest rates to deliberately provoke a recession in order to get inflation under control.
The suffering of workers and the poor occurs while the overall wealth in Canadian society is rising. StatsCan reported that Canada’s nominal GDP rose 11.8% in 2022, after a 13.4% increase in 2021. It credited this increase in GDP to rising prices—that is, inflation, price-gouging, and the soaring cost of living. While workers and the poor struggle to pay for rent and groceries, the rich get richer. StatsCan found that the top 1% of all tax filers in Canada saw their incomes increase by 9.4% in 2021, while the poorest half of Canadians saw their average income decrease by $1,400 that year. As Karl Marx noted, “There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without decreasing its misery.” Indeed, economic misery is increasing for the vast majority of Canadians.
What can you say about a socioeconomic system, capitalism, that is actively taking society backwards? Where the majority of people are getting poorer, sicker, and dying younger? What we can say is that this is a rotten, fundamentally unjust system that must be overthrown to solve society’s most pressing problems; to improve material conditions so that each generation can be optimistic its children will be wealthier and happier than themselves. But this requires the revolutionary transformation of society along socialist lines—which in turn requires the building a mass revolutionary communist party capable of leading the working class, the only force capable of carrying out this transformation, to victory. That’s what the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) is working to build. If you want to help build such an organization, I urge you to get involved with the IMT.