Nearly 10,000 Manitobans are now represented in Canada’s largest population health research study. The aggregated Baseline Health and Risk Factor Questionnaire (HRFQ) data from the Manitoba Tomorrow Project (MTP) are now harmonized and available through the CanPath Portal, marking an important step forward for pan-Canadian health research.

“Bringing Manitoba into the harmonized dataset is an important step toward becoming a truly pan-Canadian cohort,” says Dr. Jennifer Brooks, CanPath Executive Director. “Their inclusion expands our national reach and helps ensure Canadian health research reflects the full diversity of regions and communities across the country.”

Representation across regions matters for understanding how health, lifestyle, environment, and social factors shape outcomes across the country. Manitoba’s inclusion meaningfully expands that national picture, particularly across the prairie provinces.

This release also represents the seventh version of CanPath’s HRFQ harmonized dataset, which now includes 935 core variables collected at baseline across CanPath’s regional cohorts.

What is the HRFQ harmonized dataset?

The Baseline Health and Risk Factor Questionnaire (HRFQ) is a foundational tool used across CanPath’s regional population-based cohorts to collect information about participants’ health, lifestyle, and environmental exposures at the time of enrollment. Through CanPath’s national harmonization efforts, these questionnaires, originally collected separately by each regional cohort, are carefully aligned so that researchers can analyze them together within a single, comparable dataset.

The HRFQ harmonized dataset includes information on participants’:

• Socio-demographic and economic characteristics (such as education, employment, and income)
• Lifestyle and behaviours (including alcohol use, tobacco use, physical activity, sleep, and diet)
• Reproductive health history
• Personal and family history of disease
• Self-reported physical measures (height, weight, waist and hip circumference)
• Physical environment exposures (such as sun and passive smoke exposure)
• Select variables derived from open-ended questionnaire responses

What Manitoba adds to the national picture

As one of seven regional population-based research cohorts across Canada, the Manitoba Tomorrow Project (MTP) is part of the prairie region, supporting provincial and national studies focused on cancer, chronic disease, and population health.

“We are very pleased to have Manitoba Tomorrow Project participant data included in the CanPath harmonized dataset,” says Dr. Donna Turner, Manitoba Tomorrow Project Scientific Director. “Integration with CanPath is not only an important step for the MTP, but for Manitoba as a whole. This work helps to ensure that Manitobans’ unique environments, lifestyles and risk factors are accounted for in national-scale health research initiatives, in addition to the provincial and regional work we are already supporting.”

Manitoba’s inclusion also advances CanPath’s broader goal of equitable national representation. While Healthy Future Sask continues active recruitment, this release brings CanPath another step closer to full pan-Canadian coverage, ensuring that health research can better reflect the realities of people living across Canada’s diverse regions.

Harmonization in action: How MTP was integrated

Harmonization is the process that makes large-scale, cross-cohort research possible. Although regional cohorts often collect similar types of information, questionnaires may differ in wording, response options, timing, or structure. Harmonization carefully aligns these variables so that researchers can compare and analyze them together with confidence.

CanPath works closely with Maelstrom Research, an international leader in data harmonization methodology, to support this process across cohorts. For the Manitoba integration, the teams worked together to map MTP’s HRFQ variables to the existing national structure, resolve differences across datasets, and assess data quality and completeness.

“We are very pleased to see the Manitoba Tomorrow Project now fully integrated into the CanPath Baseline Health and Risk Factor Questionnaire harmonized dataset,” says Anouar Nechba, Maelstrom Research Project Manager. “Our prospective partnership with the study team made the integration process remarkably efficient and ensured that the harmonization potential with the existing CanPath dataset yields a high percent completeness. With the addition of nearly 10,000 participants, researchers now have access to an even richer and more diverse pool of high-quality, comparable data. We are excited to see how this enhanced dataset will strengthen national analyses and support new opportunities for population health research across Canada.”

This work reflects sustained collaboration between regional cohorts, the CanPath National Coordinating Centre, and Maelstrom, ensuring that data from different parts of the country can be used together to answer complex population health questions.

What researchers can do with this expanded dataset

With Manitoba now included, researchers have access to an even broader and more representative national baseline dataset. The HRFQ harmonized dataset supports a wide range of research questions across disciplines, including:

• Environmental health research, such as examining sun exposure, passive smoke exposure, or urban–rural differences across regions
• Health equity studies, using socio-demographic and economic variables to explore disparities across provinces
• Chronic disease risk factor research, combining lifestyle behaviours, family history, medication use, and physical measures
• Cross-cohort population analyses, including rural communities, agricultural workers, older adults, or other subpopulations that benefit from national-scale samples

By enabling consistent analyses across regional cohorts, harmonized baseline data help researchers move beyond single-province studies and toward truly national insights.

What’s next for CanPath’s national data journey

The inclusion of Manitoba marks a significant milestone in CanPath’s ongoing effort to build a comprehensive, pan-Canadian health research platform. With Healthy Future Sask still actively recruiting, future harmonization cycles will continue to expand the scope and representation of the national dataset.

As additional variables and datasets are released over time, CanPath will continue working with regional cohorts and national partners to ensure that Canada’s population health research infrastructure remains high-quality, transparent, and accessible.

Each new release strengthens the foundation for research that can inform prevention, policy, and care across Canada.

Explore the dataset

Researchers can explore the dataset and begin a data access application through the CanPath Data Portal.

For more information, please contact:

Megan Fleming
Communications & Knowledge Translation Officer
Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow’s Health (CanPath)
info@canpath.ca