Ontario wellbeing index still in the dumps

To help answer the question, “How are we really doing?” the  Ontario Trillium Foundation – an agency of the Government of Ontario and one of Canada’s largest granting foundations – commissioned the Canadian Index of Wellbeing, which is down, to produce detailed reports of community wellbeing for five regions, based on boundaries used by Ontario ministries.

The reports, called A Profile of Wellbeing in Ontario, are broken up into five reports for the North, West, East, and Central regions, and for the city of Toronto. The Foundation will be releasing these reports on Tuesday, December 13.

CIW recently released their national reports that noted while Canada’s economy has recovered from the 2008 recession, our wellbeing has not.

The United Nations and the OECD agree – the true measure of a country’s progress must include the wellbeing of its citizens. CIW shifts the focus from solely on the economy and Gross Domestic Product to include other critical domains of people’s lives.

“The Canadian Index of Wellbeing came about because too much emphasis was being placed on economic growth and not enough on wellbeing. Gross Domestic Product only measures economic productivity and does not measure social progress. There’s a global movement now looking beyond GDP, and that has helped foster the development of the CIW. We’ve created an Index that measures aspects of people’s lives that really do matter to them,” explained Bryan Smale, Director of the Canadian Index of Wellbeing at the University of Waterloo.

Watch: How are we really doing?

CIW uses research to determine whether Canadians are making progress towards sustainable wellbeing in eight inter-connected domains, or categories – Health, Living Standards, Community Vitality, Environment, Leisure and Culture, Education, Time Use, and Democratic Engagement.

Ontario’s GDP has recovered by 11.2 percent from its lowest point following the recession of 2008 – a good sign. However, the 2014 report commissioned by OTF, “How are Ontarians really doing?”, showed that Ontarians’ overall wellbeing continues to lag well behind our economic growth.

In the report, you will find information about crime rates, access to physicians, greenhouse gas emissions, stress rates, and commute times. Some of the information may at first glance appear obvious, but upon comparing the various regions, what becomes clear is that we’re not doing as well as we think we are.

That’s why OTF used the Index in the creation of our Action Areas – the areas in which we focus our investments. As we accumulate more data, these reports in tandem with other sources will help establish the best measure for OTF’s accumulated impact over the next decade.

“The Ontario Trillium Foundation deserves credit for having the vision to recognize that using a framework like the CIW to monitor progress in key areas was important to incorporate as part of its vision. Having this data will accelerate the work the Foundation can do. It will bring OTF closer to addressing issues of concern to people at a more localized level,” said Smale.