The crash of an airliner is a tragic disaster that triggers major investigations and quick action to make sure the same problem doesn’t occur again. As a result, these events are, thankfully, extremely rare. Imagine the response, from industry, government and the public, if a plane crashed every day.

And yet a recent report by Statistics Canada highlights a preventable cause of death that is having exactly that kind of impact, but which is being largely ignored. The study demonstrates that income inequality is associated with the premature death of 40,000 Canadians a year. That’s equal to 110 Canadians dying prematurely each day. To put that into context, imagine a Bombardier CS-100 jet airplane full of passengers falling out of the sky every day for a year.

How does this report arrive at this conclusion? It followed 2.7 million Canadians over a 16-year period and calculated death rates from a wide range of diseases and injuries as a function of the person’s income. Canadians were divided into five quintiles of approximately equal numbers from poorest to wealthiest. The researchers then compared the number of deaths of the wealthiest 20 per cent of Canadians to the other 80 per cent.

They came to the conclusion that if all Canadians were as healthy as the top 20 per cent of income earners, there would be approximately 40,000 fewer deaths each year, every year. Of these, 25,000 fewer deaths would be among Canadian men and 15,000 among Canadian women. These numbers are comparable to eliminating all deaths from coronary artery disease.

The report also calculates the relative rate of mortality, comparing the likelihood of death between someone in the poorest 20 per cent of Canadians and one of the wealthiest 20 per cent of Canadians. Overall, this figure is 1.67 for men and 1.52 for women, indicating that a poor male has a 67 per cent greater chance of dying each year and a poor woman has a 52 per cent greater chance than their wealthy counterparts.

The study goes into further details, outlining income-related statistics for specific diseases. Poor Canadian males have a 63 per cent greater chance of dying each year from heart disease than their wealthy counterparts. For women it’s a difference of 53 per cent. The excess cardiovascular deaths associated with not being as healthy as the wealthy are 19 per cent for men and 18 per cent for women.

In relation to mortality from diabetes, the figures are even more striking. Poor Canadian men have a 150 per cent greater chance and poor women a 160 per cent greater chance of dying from diabetes than wealthy Canadians.

This means that if all Canadians were as healthy as wealthy Canadians, there would be nearly 40 per cent fewer deaths from diabetes and nearly 20 per cent fewer deaths from cardiovascular disease every year. Similar numbers showing a profound difference between wealthy and all other Canadians appear for virtually every known potentially fatal health problem, including cancer, respiratory disease, injuries, HIV-AIDS, and many more.

In the United Kingdom, the publication of figures like these has been the source of much public concern over the last 40 years. In Canada we have no such response. There is little media attention to these kinds of studies, and major disease associations refuse to acknowledge their implications for preventing life-threatening. Meanwhile, politicians at all levels have ignored the relationship between income inequality and health, preferring to forgo difficult discussions about how to redress the problem. Instead, our leaders focus on a reactive health-care approach to illness that precludes important consideration of broader determinants shaping the unequal distribution of premature death.

Income inequality is not only bad for our quality of life and economic productivity, it is directly related to the deaths of Canadians on an almost unimaginable scale.

Canadians are increasingly concerned about growing income inequality and are becoming more aware of its health effects. It’s time for a serious response from policy-makers, media and the public. Otherwise we’ll simply continue to watch 110 Canadians falling out of the sky every day, each day, 365 days a year.

Dennis Raphael, PhD, is a professor of health policy and management at York University in Toronto. He is co-author of Social Determinants of Health: The Canadian Facts, which can be downloaded at no cost. Toba Bryant, PhD, is an assistant professor of health sciences at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and author of An Introduction to Health Policy.