[CIW-News] The Institute of Wellbeing and its signature product, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW) Launch

The Institute of Wellbeing and CIW are Official…

Toronto, June 11 – Yesterday morning I had the great honour and privilege of officially launching the Institute of Wellbeing and its signature product, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW).

The Institute is independent, non-partisan with a newly forming affiliation with the world-class and highly innovative University of Waterloo. The CIW is a new and better way of measuring Canadians’ quality of life. Right now our country lacks a single, national instrument for tracking and reporting on how Canadians are really doing. The CIW will report on trends and changes in eight interconnected areas that are vital to Canadians’ quality of life.

I want to thank the many people and organizations whose hard work over the years made this day possible: the Atkinson Charitable Foundation (ACF) which provided leadership and financial support throughout our developmental years; the hundreds of Canadians who, through three rounds of coast-to-coast-to-coast public consultations, candidly told us what matters to their quality life and what we should be measuring; the dozens of nationally and internationally renowned indicator experts who devised the CIW framework, put together the data with Statistics Canada’s support, wrote our technical studies and put us through a rigorous validation process to ensure that our methodology is sound and our data is the best available.

I also want to thank the University Waterloo – with whom the Institute of Wellbeing is affiliated – its President Dave Johnston and Dr. Frances Westley. And last, but certainly not least, I want to thank our alliance of funders who have and are generously supporting the Institute’s work, including the ACF, RBC Foundation, Province of Ontario, The Lawson Foundation, The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, and the Canadian Council on Learning.

To find out more about why Canada needs a broader vision of wellbeing and how the CIW will promote public policy that is more responsive to the needs of Canadians, please read my op-ed There’s more to life than GDP and the Toronto Star editorial An Index of Wellbeing. As more media clips come in, they will appear on our website at www.ciw.ca.

Sincerely,
The Honourable Roy J. Romanow
Chair, Institute of Wellbeing Advisory Board

First Report Released…

The Institute of Wellbeing launched its first report yesterday, How are Canadians Really Doing? The report summarizes the key findings of the first three research studies on Living Standards, Health Populations and Community Vitality:

Even in good economic times the lion’s share of benefits went to the wealthy while the poor stayed poor and the shrinking middle class muddled through. Canadians are living longer but not healthier, the health of young Canadians is particularly in decline. Crime is down and social relationships in our communities are stronger. Cuts or lack of improvements to government programs like welfare, Employment Insurance and publicly funded medical services are hurting Canadians.

You can find the Institute’s first report and the full research studies at www.ciw.ca.

Connecting the Dots…

A key goal of the CIW is to connect the dots among the wide variety of factors that shape our quality of life. The first report found that health status is strongly determined by income and education. It also found that the bulk of those who are poor come from five specific groups – lone parents, unattached individuals aged 45-64, recent immigrants, persons with work-limiting disabilities, and Aboriginal people living off-reserve – even though they make up just 25% of Canada’s total population.

The first report focused particularly on how the drop in health among Canadian youth is connected to the sharp decline in their financial security. In 1998, over 80% of 12–19-year-olds reported “excellent” or “very good” health, but by 2005 this had plunged to 67%. Not surprisingly, given the connection between health and wealth, this was matched by a jump of almost 14 percentage points in the proportion of youth working in low-paid jobs.

Check out our new-look website…

To find out more about the Institute, our first report and how you can become more involved in improving the quality of life for Canadians, please check out our new-look website at www.ciw.ca. Everything produced by the Institute is available free of charge in both user-friendly and research-rich format.