Original language of petition: English
The Government thanks the petitioners for expressing their views about well-being measurement. The Government shares the view that traditional measures of economic success, like growth in GDP, need to be complemented with a range of quality of life measures, based on an understanding that not everything that matters can be measured in purely economic or financial terms. In 2019, the Prime Minister tasked the Minister of Middle Class Prosperity and Associate Minister of Finance with ‘better incorporating quality of life measurements into government decision-making and budgeting’, drawing on the global examples of countries like New Zealand and Scotland.
Subsequently, on April 19, 2021 as part of Budget 2021, the Department of Finance released a draft Quality of Life Framework as part of Annex 4 and, concurrently, a discussion paper entitled Measuring What Matters: Toward a Quality of Life Strategy for Canada. This document lays out the global and domestic context for the Government’s work to identify quality of life measurements, describes the process undertaken to arrive at a draft framework summarizing a set of measures intended for use in government decision-making, and invites the Canadian public to provide feedback. It can be read online at: https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/services/publications/measuring-what-matters-toward-quality-life-strategy-canada.html.
Notably, the document addresses many of the issues raised in the petition, including the need for the Government to draw on a broad spectrum of evidence beyond traditional economic measures to inform its decisions as well as the importance of considering distributions of quality of life determinants with a view to closing gaps, and long-term impacts on future quality of life to ensure sustainability and resilience.
Petitioners may also be interested in key aspects of Budget 2021, which further advance the Government’s ambitions in its quality of life measurement exercise, including Annex 5, the ‘Budget Impacts Report’, which assesses each Budget 2021 measure in terms of who it is expected to affect most, and how those groups are expected to be affected, using the draft Quality of Life Framework to articulate this.
Budget 2021 also makes key investments in federal data, to fill key gaps in the evidence of what matters most to Canadians. These include:
The Government encourages the petitioners to review the aforementioned discussion paper, and to submit their views electronically at fin.qualityoflife-qualitedevie.fin@canada.ca. The paper can be found at: https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/services/publications/measuring-what-matters-toward-quality-life-strategy-canada.html. Their feedback will help to inform next steps for the Quality of Life Framework.
Only validated signatures are counted towards the total number of signatures.
Province / Territory | Signatures |
---|---|
Alberta | 56 |
British Columbia | 677 |
Manitoba | 13 |
New Brunswick | 23 |
Newfoundland and Labrador | 7 |
Northwest Territories | 6 |
Nova Scotia | 25 |
Ontario | 283 |
Prince Edward Island | 29 |
Quebec | 52 |
Saskatchewan | 12 |
Yukon | 2 |