Media Clipping — Sept 28, 2002, The Toronto Star

A better way to crunch the numbers

By Kelly Toughill

BY ALL STANDARD measurements, the ice storm that ravaged Quebec in 1998 was good for the economy, a boon to the bottom line of at least $1.5 billion.

The same is true of the catastrophic airplane crash that killed 229 people off the coast of Nova Scotia six months later. Hundreds of international journalists and grieving mourners dropped millions of dollars here in the sad weeks after Swissair 111 smashed into the sea. Governments poured millions more into the recovery effort and investigation.

Both disasters fattened the gross domestic product of the two provinces, bolstering the key measurement used to gauge the health of the economy and consequent progress of society.

That, says Ronald Colman, is a very big problem.

"The current measures of progress send misleading messages to politicians and journalists," Colman says. "The standard indicators skew the policy agenda."

Four years ago, Colman began a quest to change that. He set up Genuine Progress Index Atlantic, a tiny little think-tank he hopes will develop a set of indicators to replace the all-important GDP.

For most politicians, an increase in GDP is unqualified good news and a key measure of how well they are managing government. It doesn't matter if the gain was driven by war, by the wholesale destruction of an irreplaceable natural resource or even if the increase in GDP affected unemployment or local incomes. Any increase in GDP is a political and economic victory in the world of sound bites and opinion polls.

But in the shopping malls of Canada, where people have to spend real dollars to buy their kids boots every winter, an increase in the provincial GDP often means much less. Look at Newfoundland. It has had the fastest growing GDP in Canada for the last four out of five years, but still has the highest unemployment rate and lowest average income in Canada. The big oil and gas money driving the GDP boom isn't trickling down much.

Colman isn't the first guy to look askance at the GDP. Groups all over North America and Europe are trying to develop a comprehensive wellness index of one sort or another. Colman's group is a little different in two ways. One is that he attaches dollar figures to his calculations, the second is that he isn't driven by a political agenda. He has used research from both the far right Fraser Institute and the union-funded Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in his work. He has looked at costs of crime, which is a hot-button issue for the Canadian Alliance, and the depletion of natural resources, which is an issue dear to the NDP.

Statistics Canada backs the group, offering advice and help for what Colman hopes will turn out to be a prototype for Canada.

He is startled by what his group has found in researching the 22 indicators that make up his Genuine Progress Index for Nova Scotia, information he is convinced should be debated widely, but isn't even known.

For instance, Canadians spend 9 per cent less time volunteering today than a decade ago. In Nova Scotia, the value of the voluntary sector is equivalent to 10 per cent of the GDP - more than all government expenditures combined. A drop of 9 per cent in volunteerism means a crisis for vital services.

"If volunteers didn't exist in rural Nova Scotia, seniors wouldn't get the care they need, there would be no literacy programs, little after-school help, no firefighters or search and rescue teams; our standard of living would plummet," he says.

"Yet this major decline in volunteer work has never been debated in the legislature. Instead of being seen as a crisis, it doesn't even register on the radar screen."

The decline in volunteers is directly related to a crisis in leisure time, he says. Adults in the average Canadian household work 20 hours more per week than they did a century ago.

"If you only look at paid work, it looks like we're fine: The work week has dropped from 62 hours per week in 1900 to 40," he says.

"But that only counted one person in the workforce, now most households have two. If you add up the total burden of paid and unpaid work, as households we are working 20 hours more per week than a century ago. It's simple arithmetic, but people don't see it."

Colman doesn't want to do away with the GDP. He says it is a useful tool and will always be an important measurement for economists and policy makers. What he wants is for people to stop equating how much we spend with our level of collective well-being. The best way to do that, he believes, is to give them another system of measurement.

"Once you measure something, you take it out of the shadows and shine a spotlight on it," he says.

"Once you shine a spotlight on something, often it becomes obvious what you need to do."

Copyright © 2002, The Toronto Star

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