How the Canadians monitor the effect of cuts through a Quality of Life Index
Posted by adrianb1 on October 6, 2009
I attended a fascinating LGA event last Friday on public spending cuts from the 1990s onwards in Canada, and the use of a ‘quality of life index‘ to monitor the effects. The starkest personal lesson for me was how little I knew about this not so distant foreign country and how much there is to learn from their parallel experience.
The first lesson was about perspective. At an event earlier in the year, the Canadian experience had been portrayed as an enlightened, theme based approach rather than crude salami slicing. This time it was characterised as central government simply passing on the costs to local government. (A BBC report provides yet another perspective)
They don’t have the same sort of enforced reporting by local government as here, but the quality of life index looks at key indicators across 25 of the larger communities covering social, economic and some environmental trends. It is a local government led initiative, co-ordinated by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. There are indicators on things like social housing, number of recreation centres, how immigrants are faring etc. The index is apparently high profile, on the national news and taken seriously by government (even if not necessarily high in the consciousness of the general public). Based on these indicators, the FCM believes that Canadian cities have only just recovered from the 1990s cuts.
