Marriage and divorce rates are no longer on the watch list of Canada’s national statistical agency. The Globe and Mail reports that Statistics Canada will stop collecting and tracking these numbers due in part to cost cuts at the agency and a culture shift in the nature of relationships.

As the definitions of relationships become blurred, hazy and difficult to track, maintaining this information no longer seemed relevant.

The agency’s last national figures on this data were published in mid-July, after collecting data on divorces since 1972 and marriages since 1921. Cutting this data bank will save $250,000, the news source reports.

The National Center for Health Statistics, a branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the official data record for marriages and divorces in America. According to 2009 data, the most recent available, there were more than 2 million marriages in the U.S. The marriage rate was 6.8 per 1,000 total population, with the divorce rate at 3.4 per 1,000.

However, Time magazine recently wondered if American marriage and divorce stats were realistic, given that many states do not collect marital data and many methods and sources are used.

“It’s a very murky statistic,” Jennifer Baker, director of the marriage- and family-therapy programs at the Forest Institute, told the publication.

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