Base → People → Deaths in office → Statistics

A once-common occurrence that has become rare

by Maurice Y. Michaud (he/him)

Yves Blais (1931–1998)
© Photo National Assembly, Québec — Fair use

A total of 985 parliamentarians in Canada have died while in office. Given that there have been 14,874 so far, that represents a rather astonishing 6.62% of those who have been elected in the 160 years covered by PoliCan. That’s more than 1 in 20! But what’s more intriguing is that, although there are more seats to fill today and, therefore, more people are being elected, only 99 of those deaths have occurred since 1975. Put differently, 89.95% of all the deaths in office have occurred before 1975.

Another striking comparison:

• In the 10 years from 1865 to 1874 inclusively, when there were about 534 seats in all legislatures, there were 39 deaths in office, giving an annual average of 3.9.
   
• In the 25 years from 2000 to 2024 inclusively, when there were about 1,100 seats in all legislatures, there were 41 deaths in office, giving an annual average of 1.6. There could have been 97 had the annual average remained as it was in that decade of the 19th century.

And that’s not all. As this graph illustrates, it got much worse from 1875 to 1974.

So, the reason why you probably wouldn’t have guessed that there had been so many deaths in office is that such deaths have averaged 1.9 per year for the last 51 years — indeed, a lifetime! Therefore, you had little way of knowing that they occurred much more frequently before we were old enough to pay attention or were even alive!