It is high time for the Quebec government to get down to business and significantly increase the death benefit offered by the Quebec Pension Plan (QPP).
This is all the more urgent as the number of deaths in 2022 hit a sad all-time record.
This benefit, capped at $2,500 for 26 years, now only covers a portion of the funeral expenses that bereaved families must pay when a close relative dies.
In 1998, the current death benefit was set at $2,500. It was even a drop from the previous service, which reached $3,590 in 1997.
If the government of François Legault, as part of the public consultation that Finance Minister Eric Girard has just held on the QPP, agrees to increase the death benefit, albeit only to match inflation accumulated since 1998, the benefit would be $4,192.
That amount could cover at least the basic funeral expenses that low-income bereaved families cannot even afford without going into debt when a poor close relative dies.
With more than $100 billion in reserves accumulated from employee and employer contributions, the QPP has the financial resources to provide adequate death benefits to its 6.3 million members and beneficiaries.
Make the government stop being cheap with their dead!
death hits hard
In 2022, Quebec recorded a sad record, the highest number of deaths ever recorded for our territory.
According to the Quebec Statistics Institute, around 78,200 people died in 2022, surpassing the previous record set in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 by 3,650.
Quebec ended 2020 with 74,550 deaths, including several thousand from excess mortality attributed to COVID-19.
In the second year of the pandemic, i.e. 2021, there were 69,900 deaths, heralding a return to “normal” mortality.
Unfortunately, this was not the case as the number of deaths ended up increasing by 11.9% in 2022 compared to 2021.
To what factor can we attribute the difference of 8,300 additional deaths in Quebec in 2022 compared to 2021?
Quebec again fell victim to an excess mortality phenomenon in 2022, when the total number of observed deaths far exceeded the number of deaths normally expected.
According to data collected weekly by Statistics Quebec, the number of deaths attributed to excess mortality was 7,454 in the 2020 pandemic year. In 2022, the number of deaths related to excess mortality for the whole year reached 6,798, that is only 656 deaths less than in 2020.
The causes of the return of excess mortality in 2022? Statistics Quebec highlights the omicron wave of COVID-19, the May heatwave and the “triple epidemic” including waves of influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and COVID-19.
