Dead Drop

But GNL transformation guru unable to explain anything

Image: Peter Cowan/CBC with data from Statistics Canada

“For the third year in a row, life expectancy at birth of Canadians fell, ….”

You start with a line like that, you tend to get attention.

And sure enough the conventional media across Canada picked up that line and ran with it from Statistics Canada’s latest look at death in Canada.

There’s even an explanation of things right there:

Life expectancy declines when there are more deaths [than expected or than usual], when deaths occur at younger ages, or a combination of both.

Yet in CBC’s story that localised things a bit, people the Ceeb’s editors called experts couldn’t explain what was going on.

One of them was Pat Parfrey, lately the deputy minister of transformatively transformational transforming in the provincial government. When he was practicing medicine, Parfrey was a nephrologist, meaning he was an internal medicine specialist who focused on the kidneys but for some reason CBC trans-ed him into an epidemiologist. That’s someone who studies the causes, the number, and distribution of health and disease.

Maybe the CBC folks got confused because what they quoted Parfrey as saying came off a bit more like a phrenologist, which is someone practicing the debunked “science” of relating things like intelligence to the shape of the skull.

According to CBC, Parfrey put the drop in life expectancy down to COVID (the peak in life expectancy was 14 months before COVID started) then acknowledged that COVID killed mostly older people - which wouldn’t skew the life expectancy numbers that much, of course - and then admitted he found it “surprising” that “the life expectancy impact was greater in Newfoundland and Labrador than it was in Canada.”

Parfrey eventually got around to talking about chronic diseases, which is another part of the overall health picture here but it’s still not clear why he found any of this a surprise. Parfrey certainly wasn’t very helpful for anyone interested in understanding what is going on with all this death and dying business. We’d have had more luck with the village idiot, perhaps, who Parfrey’s former students at the medical school might (not so) fondly recall was a fixture of his classes.