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Reality Check

Welcome to Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing, a colour tabloid magazine co-produced by the Atkinson Charitable Foundation and GPIAtlantic. It is the Reality Check mission to:

Promote the creation of a reliable and statistically valid Canadian Index of Wellbeing that will provide a more complete and accurate picture of how Canadians are really doing;
Report on important indicator work measuring social, economic and environmental wellbeing, that is already going on throughout Canada;
Ensure that these new measures of progress get the same policy attention that leaders, economists and journalists currently devote to tracking whether our economy is growing or shrinking.

The current issue as well as back issues can be downloaded as PDFs from this page. If you would like to receive future issues by postal mail, simply send us your address.

Note that production of Reality Check is on hold as of the last issue in December 2005.

Reality Check: Energy Issue
December 2005	Vol. 5, No. 2
Reality Check explores ecological sustainability and renewable energy technologies. A look at conservation measures such as financial incentives for fuel-efficient cars, efficiency measures such as "smart" urban development and the use of waste energy in heating systems. Better measures of progress, including the new Canadian Index of Wellbeing, can help raise the profile of these energy-saving efforts, and place a redesigned energy system at the top of the policy agenda.
	Tabloid 4 pages 1.1MB PDF

Reality Check: Introducing The Canadian Index of Wellbeing
May 2005	Vol. 5, No. 1
The CIW won’t come up with the answer to everything, but its aim is still ambitious. And the questions it asks are every bit as important as the answers it offers. It aims to assess whether Canadians are better off or worse off than they used to be—not just materially or based on how fast the economy is growing, but in terms of their overall wellbeing. By doing so, it will become Canada’s core, central measure of progress, and it will relegate the Gross Domestic Product to the function for which it was originally designed and intended: measuring the overall size of the market economy.
	Tabloid 4 pages 1.3MB PDF

Reality Check: Jobs Jobs Jobs Counting Them Wrong and Right
November 2004	Vol. 4, No. 2
Jobs Jobs Jobs Counting Them Wrong and Right examines how the nature of work has changed dramatically over the past century. Conventional measures of progress chronicle the benefits of these changes such as higher levels of income and greater consumption. Yet, we have been less successful in documenting the human cost of modern work. Canadians trends, outlined in this issue, show a decline in work improvement progress over a 25-year period using a number of key indicators. Reality Check #9 looks at successful experiments in Europe, and examines Canada's own landmark Donner Commission Report. These experiments and recommendations demonstrate that it is possible to reduce overwork, improve work-family balance, increase free time and vacation time, and reduce unemployment and underemployment.
	Tabloid 4 pages 1.6MB PDF

Reality Check: Less May Be More
April 2004	Vol. 4, No. 1
Every day we use vital services that the earth provides us for 'free'. We eat food grown in soil rich in centuries of decaying organic matter. We breathe air that is filtered by plants and trees. The more demands we make on nature-the more food, energy, timber and other resources we consume - the more the economy grows. And when we exceed nature's capacity to absorb our wates, we grow the economy again by spending money cleaning up the mess. Yet our standard measures of progress misleadingly assume that a growing economy makes us better off and mroe prosperous. This issue of Reality Check looks at better ways to measure those demands on nature - ways that count the true costs of pollution and over-consumption, and that count a reduction in our impact on the environment, rather than an increase, as a sign of genuine progress.
	Tabloid 4 pages 521K PDF

Reality Check: The Boon and Bust of Technology
October 2003	Vol. 3, No. 3
Previous issues of Reality Check have focused on single components of proposed new measures of wellbeing - such as population health, volunteer work, or valuing our forests - that are not captured in our conventional measures of progress. This issue, for the first time, focuses on one of the major values and benefits of more comprehensive measures of progress: Their capacity to demonstrate connections among a wide range of economic, social and environmental variables. In this issue, Reality Check steps back to look at the fishery, and at our industrial food and transportation systems.
	Tabloid 4 pages 769K PDF

Reality Check: Counting Uncounted Contributions
July 2003	Vol. 3, No. 2
This issue focuses on vital services the economy does not count – household and voluntary work. Every day Canadians perform countless hours of valuable services that contribute to quality of life and economic prosperity. These contributions are massive but do not show up in our standand measures of economic progress.
	Tabloid 4 pages 575K PDF

Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing
May 2003	Vol. 3, No. 1
	Tabloid 4 pages 575K PDF

Reality Check: Health as Human Capital
December 2002	Vol. 2, No. 3
	Tabloid 4 pages 1.9MB PDF

Reality Check: Valuing our natural wealth
August 2002	Vol. 2, No. 2
	Tabloid 4 pages 1.9MB PDF

Reality Check: Sustainability and Equity
April 2002	Vol. 2, No. 1
	Tabloid 4 pages 1.9MB PDF

Reality Check: Why we need New Measures of Wellbeing
October 2001	Vol. 1, No. 1
	Tabloid 4 pages 1.2MB PDF

The PDF versions of Reality Check are formatted to print on 11x17" paper. If you would like to receive future issues in hard copy, by postal mail, simply send us your address.

GPIAtlantic
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Glen Haven, NS
Canada B3Z 2T5
Phone: (902) 489-2524
Fax: (902) 826-7088
info@gpiatlantic.org

ReThinking
Development
The Second International Conference on Gross National Happiness
Antigonish, June, 2005
Conference Proceedings
Conference Outcomes

Updated: 14-sep-07 webmaster@gpiatlantic.org
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