Linking the 2006 Census of Population to the Canadian Mortality Database: Descriptive and Validation Study

The Canadian Mortality Database (CMDB) is an administrative database that collects information on cause of death from all provincial and territorial vital statistics registries in Canada. The CMDB lacks subpopulation identifiers to examine mortality rates and disparities among groups such as First Nations, Métis, Inuit and members of visible minority groups. Linkage between the CMDB and the Census of Population is an approach to circumvent this limitation. This report describes a linkage between the CMDB (2006 to 2011) and the 2006 Census of Population, which was carried out using hierarchical deterministic exact matching, with a focus on methodology and validation.