The Decline of Canada’s Quality of Life Indexes
As Canada slides down the quality-of-life indexes and many once-poor countries climb up them, Canadians may find themselves having to readjust their image of their country.
Canada, once the global icon for quality of living, is now on par in some respects with Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Croatia, and other former communist countries of Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, it’s lagging behind countries such as Kuwait in terms of happiness, Thailand in terms of safety, and Slovenia in terms of health care. The good news remains, though, that the country still has a lot of potential.
The shift has been a long time in the making. While a Fraser Institute study released last week found that standards of living have been dropping steadily in Canada since 2019, the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI) suggests the decline has been going on for decades.
The country topped the list for eight years in the 1990s—the undisputed best place in the world. Many older Canadians have not updated their image of their country since.
Although Canadians are still richer, healthier, and happier than most people in the world, the country never again attained the 1990s heights in the HDI. In fact, it didn’t even attain those heights in the 1990s—after a change in the methodology, the HDI was rewritten to show, retroactively, that Canada only placed a maximum of third in the 1990s.
Many of the other indexes that appeared over the decades confirm the trend.
In those 11 years of Numbeo records, Canada dropped to 30th spot in health care from 21st, and to 33rd from seventh in the property-price-to-income ratio. It is also behind Eastern Europe’s Slovenia in terms of health care and behind Romania, Hungary, Serbia, and most of the region’s other nations in terms of safety.
Nope. Overall, Canada has fallen from 10th place in 2011, when the index was first compiled, to 15th currently. This is despite Canada ranking fourth in the “acceptance of gays and lesbians” category—an area the federal government has made a main focus—and ranking relatively high in the category of the proportion of women with advanced education.
Whether Canada can make the same claim in another three decades remains to be seen.