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SEVEN WAYS TO MEASURE WHERE WE'RE REALLY ATEconomic indicators only tell part of the story. Enter the CIW: Canadian Index of Well-being By ANDRÉ PICARD Globe and Mail Thursday, May 12, 2005 Page A19
At times, we will look to life expectancy, the unemployment rate, and the number of people living below the poverty line. But to get a true measure of the overall health of a country -- and more important, whether its status is improving or declining -- we need to track a broad spectrum of health indicators, environmental factors and social measures like community participation. That's why a group of leading academics and policy-makers has set out to create a Canadian Index of Well-being, or CIW. The idea got an important boost last week when Roy Romanow, head of the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada, enthusiastically endorsed the idea. "Our mission for the CIW is to provide Canadians with a clear, valid, and regular accounting of the things that matter to them and the genuine progress of Canada," Mr. Romanow told the annual conference of the United Ways of Canada. "The task before us is to create a new tool that will help foster a common vision for the future of Canada. We want to account honestly and accurately for changes in the human, social, economic and natural wealth. We want to use that as a basis for improving our performance in areas that matter to Canadians." Mr. Romanow said promoting the index is a natural extension of his work on the commission, whose overriding goal was "to make Canadians the healthiest people in the world." He hopes to use his high profile to get the issue in the public eye and on the political agenda. Mr. Romanow, postcommission, is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan and a fellow at the Atkinson Charitable Foundation. He has also become the public conscience of medicare, a role elected officials have abandoned. Yet, he never tires of saying that no matter how good is the health system (or as he has taken to calling it, the "illness-care system"), it cannot on its own produce a healthy population. For this to happen, attention must be paid to the social and economic determinants of health, such as income, housing, employment and the environment. The well-being index would try to measure progress in those key areas in a concrete manner, and be used to make governments more accountable on social and health matters. The team working on creating a CIW includes representatives from Statistics Canada, Environment Canada, eight universities and six non-government research organizations, and they have $1.5-million in initial funding from the Atkinson Charitable Foundation. They are developing a set of indicators in seven areas: living standards; health outcomes; education and literacy; environmental quality; community vitality; citizen engagement; time use and work-life balance. Many of these data are much more difficult to compile than traditional economic indicators. But, as Mr. Romanow pointed out in his speech, those traditional measures are flawed and send "inaccurate and dangerous signals to policy-makers." The GDP, for example, does not distinguish between activities that bring benefits and those that cause harm. "As long as money is spent, the GDP goes up. Crime, accidents, sickness, smoking, war, pollution, natural disasters -- ice storms, floods, tornadoes -- all increase the GDP simply because money is being spent on prisons, lawyers, doctors, drugs, hospitals, cigarettes, guns, pollution cleanup and damage repair." The GDP tells us how much total income is being produced, but not how it is being distributed, and this has often lead to skewed public-policy priorities. The CIW will not, of course, come up with a single tidy answer. But it will give us a better measure of the health of Canadians, and the society they live in, than can be measured in dollars alone. Good health and a good life -- for individuals and for society as a whole -- is a complex equation but, by and large, people know what matters. "If you look at what people have said about what makes a 'good life' going back to at least the 5th century B.C., they will say things like: 'Well, if you have health, if you have somebody who loves you, if you have financial security and you live in a friendly community and have decent housing, then you're having a fairly good life,' " said Alex Michalos, director of the Institute for Social Research and Evaluation at the University of Northern British Columbia. "The Canadian Index of Well-being is about that kind of common sense." Copyright of the Globe and Mail
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