The information is according to the UN in its most recent report on human development. Parts are encouraging though generally we seem to be slipping on the planetary scale. The CBC provides a useful and accessible summary.
Canada has improved on the UN's Human Development Index; we find ourselves back in the top ten again, after several years in the teens. Many of us remember being at the top of the pile during the 1990s. For the current year, the top nation is Norway, which isn't all that surprising given its continued stewardship of resources. What is surprising is that for some bizarre reason, the USA is ahead of Canada on this index. The writer and I have visited the Excited States twice this year, and that certainly wouldn't be our observation. The divide between the American rich and the nation's underclass is ever more obvious than it is in Canada, though we are doing our part in the race towards the bottom.
Perhaps the wonderful policies of Our Dear Leader in Ottawa and our less-than-dear leader in Victoria are finally working in concert; the rich get richer and the rest of us... According to Stephen Harper and Christy Clark their enlightened economic policies put more money into our pockets, and as consumers we get to decide how to spend it, but that mainly benefits the rich. The rest of us are squeezed with cuts to the very services that used to lift up all of us, rich and poor alike.
The Government of BC used to promote the province as being "...the best place on Earth." For some reason that slogan has quietly disappeared, though it still pops up now and then. Having the highest rates of child poverty in Canada and seeing a doubling of homelessness in the past year alone might be reason enough to change the slogan.
Maybe we are winning the race after all. This is not good.
Photo of local street person by Jim Murray. Copyright 2014.
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