Good morning. The opioid epidemic has claimed tens of thousands of lives in Canada and has been recognized as a public health crisis. But it’s also an economic one, having disproportionately impacted workers in key sectors such as construction and the trades. The challenge in Canada is measuring that fallout. That’s in focus today, along with a look at cellular dead zones.

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Hi, I’m Jason Kirby, a reporter with The Globe’s economics team.

In August, Michael Fairchild, an Ottawa-area welder who worked on projects across Canada over his 30-year career, died of a suspected fentanyl poisoning. He became one of thousands of Canadians who’ve lost their lives in the opioid epidemic.

Beyond the unquantifiable emotional impact, no industry has experienced loss more than the trades – a sector dominated by men, who account for three-quarters of all opioid deaths in the country.

With the help of his family and best friend, I tell Michael’s story as part of an examination of how the economic losses from the crisis compound the personal despair.

Measuring the pain

In researching the story, it quickly became apparent a lot of gaps exist in the collection and analysis of opioid deaths in Canada and their effect on the labour market, at least compared to the U.S.

Around 2015, research began to come out of the U.S. showing how opioid use had led to falling labour participation rates, particularly among men, since the turn of the millennium.

Other U.S. research at the time examined the connection between local unemployment rates and opioid deaths, as well as the national economic costs of the epidemic in that country.

Closing the gap

A number of researchers in Canada have helped fill some of those gaps and continue to do so.

In 2019, Alexander Cheung, then a grad student at the University of Alberta, embarked on a research project to quantify the sheer scale of the loss from opioids. Drawing on evidence that two-thirds of overdose victims were employed in the five years before they died, he measured the forfeited labour productivity from pre-mature deaths for a study released in 2023.

The grim sum: at least $8.8-billion for those who died between 2016 and 2019.

Years earlier, as a volunteer at a food program for marginalized communities where nurses were handing out naloxone kits, he’d seen first-hand the effects opioids were having. “I was able to see something perhaps that if you were sitting at a desk or in government in the early days, the data wasn’t there yet,” he told me.

The Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction has also tallied the economic burden of substance use and addiction. I relied heavily on their 2023 Canadian Substance Uses and Harms tool, which includes estimates of the lost productivity costs of the opioid crisis from 2007 to 2020.

By combining Health Canada’s count of more recent opioid deaths (a staggering 32,600 between 2021 and the first quarter of 2025) with their research, we can calculate the total cost over the last 18 years at more than $60-billion in 2020-adjusted dollars.

Others researchers continue to piece together the economic fallout.

Studies in Ontario have shown that one-third of those people who were employed when they died of opioid toxicity worked in construction.

Meanwhile, last year, researchers at the Institute for Work & Health revealed additional evidence showing the crisis’s disproportionate impact on workers in the trades. “A lot of the research on the role of occupations in the opioid crisis has essentially come from the States,” the institute’s Dr. Nancy Carnide told me. “We’re just starting that work in Canada.”

A necessary count