Group measures overall well-being of Canadians

A national group of researchers is measuring the quality of life of all Canadians, taking into account factors like living standards, health and civic engagement. The premise is that measuring the overall progress of a society is an important step in moving it forward: what gets measured gets done.

The group’s conclusions are intended to provide a more comprehensive picture of how the nation is doing, as opposed to determining the nation’s status by looking only at its market economy.

Alex Michalos, a researcher for the project, points out that for centuries and across the world people have identified certain core items that they say create quality of life.

“A life free of disease, where people are secure and live in communities with friends and loved ones, where they don’t have to worry about where their food is going to come from or about being on the streets, these are common themes across time, themes from the ancient Greeks until today and around the world,” says Michalos, director of the Institute for Social Research and Evaluation at the University of Northern British Columbia.

The Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW) will be reflecting those values. About 24 CIW researchers, most of them volunteers, are measuring seven areas that affect everyone’s lives. The seven areas are: living standards, healthy populations, community vitality, time allocation, ecosystem health, educated populace, and civic engagement.

The researchers are gathering most of their data from Statistics Canada.

“Stats Canada produces a lot of good information mainly in silos, and it gets used in the federal and provincial and municipal departments mainly in silos,” says Michalos. “What we’re trying to do with the Canadian index is bring the information from all the diverse areas together so that we can get a general overall view of how Canadians are doing over time.”

The idea is to create a composite index so that all the information is available in a regular, routine reporting schema, says Michalos, much like the labour force statistics and health statistics are available now.

The index could help in government decision-making, he says, noting that it’s difficult to measure the most important things in life, like having a sense of security and belonging.

“But for managing government, the better the numerical base across all the fields that are of interest to you, probably the easier it is to get things done.”

Canada isn’t the only country with an interest in measuring society’s overall well-being.

The CIW researchers have been working with groups doing similar work in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere.

In June a world forum on measuring societal progress was held in Istanbul with about 1,200 in attendance. It concluded with a commitment by such groups as the European Commission, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the United Nations, the World Bank, and others, to “finding common ways to measure societal progress,” according to Michalos.

Michalos, who attended the forum, says he has never seen anything like this in the close to 40 years he has been working in the field but it’s something he’s been waiting for.

“It’s been a long time coming,” he says.

— Part one of a two-part series