Canada’s Substance Use Disorder Outlook Part 1

Substance use—including alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs, and illicit drugs—poses significant and growing challenges for the Canadian workforce and economy. As the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA) reports, the total cost of substance use in Canada in 2020 was $49.1 billion, with lost productivity alone accounting for $22.4 billion of that amount. This underscores that substance use disorders (SUDs) are not merely health issues, but significant economic concerns with direct consequences for employment, public services, and social welfare.

Effects on the Workforce

The workforce is impacted in several ways:

• Absenteeism and reduced performance: Workers suffering from substance misuse are more prone to miss work, to be tardy, or to show up impaired. This degrades productivity and increases costs for employers in reduced output, rework, errors, or even accidents.
• Premature death and long-term disability: A substantial portion of productivity losses come from early deaths and long-term disability. For example, opioid use, which took $7.1 billion in costs in 2020, contributes heavily through loss of years of productive life.
• Healthcare burden: Substance use disorders strain healthcare systems via emergency visits, treatment programs, hospitalizations, mental health services, etc. In 2020, health care costs attributable to substance misuse stood at $13.4 billion.
• Criminal justice and social costs: Other sectors also see impacts—law enforcement, courts, corrections, social welfare systems incur costs associated with substance use—and these indirectly affect economic productivity too.

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Economic Effects

From an economic perspective, the scale and structure of these costs are telling:

• Over 60 % of the costs in 2020 were due to alcohol and tobacco alone—legal substances which are often less regulated than illicit drugs.
• The per-capita cost rose by about 12 % from 2007 to 2020, reflecting increasing harms (especially from opioids and stimulants) and changing patterns of substance use.
• When productivity is lost—through absenteeism, disability, or mortality—it not only reduces GDP directly, but also decreases tax revenue, increases welfare payments and public health spending, and diminishes human capital.