Canadian Index of Wellbeing

by Gary Martens

All around us are warnings of a recession. I admit that for some this will indicate a rough time ahead, but it doesn’t have to. Our kids remember most fondly the small, one and a half story, old house we bought as a downgrade when we couldn’t pay the mortgage on the new one during the high interest rates of the 1980’s.

In Canada, as in most of the world, we measure our success by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This measures monetarily the amount of goods produced and sold within a country throughout a given year. However, that is not the only measure of success that we can access, nor is it necessarily the most useful.

Do you remember Roy Romanow? He was the premier of Saskatchewan from 1991-2001, but I want to remember him for starting the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW) which still runs out of the University of Waterloo, Ontario. This index has eight categories to measure how well we are doing as Canadians. The categories (not in any particular order) are: Education, Health, Community Vitality, Democratic Engagement, Living Standards, Time Use, Environment, and Leisure and Culture.

Unfortunately, the latest report from the CIW is quite old; 2016. I called them to find out if they were still active and the director indicated that yes, they were and the next report is expected in the spring of 2023.

The 2016 report showed that the GDP had increased by 38% from 1994-2014 (20 years) while the Index of Wellbeing only increased by 9.9%.

Education was the only category that did well, that is, kept up with GDP. Health increased by 16%. Community vitality was up by 14%. Crime actually dropped slightly and Volunteering, which had increased steadily since 1994, dropped precipitously in 2008 and has not recovered since. The only two categories to drop were Environment, at a loss of 3%, and Leisure and Culture, which had the biggest drop of 9%.

Since this 2016 CIW report is quite old, I continued my search for Canadian Wellbeing and was pleased to find that Statistics Canada is starting to provide Quality of Life indicators with their goal to have a set of indicators available within the next 5 years that will give us a good measure of our wellbeing. Statistics Canada had an updated crime severity index and it showed good news; that with 2001 being an index of 100, crime severity index now in 2021 is only 73.7. Other good news from Statistics Canada on the Quality of Life indicators is poverty rates, especially among children. The generous child care benefit and the CERB benefits during the pandemic have lowered the poverty rate among children by an astounding 50%.

I should maybe have organized this in a different way because it is always better to end on a good note. Hopefulness, also measured by Statistics Canada’s Quality of Life indicators, is shown to be down from 75% of people being hopeful in 2016 to only 64% being hopeful today.

Those of us who have any amount of empathy or caring in our bones should be invigorated to increase our Community Vitality and help out where we can. The pursuit of happiness is an ethereal dream, but when we help others, we suddenly find out we ourselves are happy. Go figure!