The Institute of Wellbeing and CIW are Official…

Posted on: Jun 11 2009 | Posted in: ACE Announcements


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.

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