Living Better

Direction: Stuck

Risk: Medium

Pace: Lagging

This pillar is about drivers that boost living standards.

The aim is to promote policies and practices that will lead to better lives for all of us. We can do this by building the world’s smartest, most-diverse and best-connected workforce.

To gauge progress on this front, we monitor eight indicators — from how quickly incomes are growing to the share of women in senior management positions.

The results show we remain far from our targets, and the pace of progress is slow.

Growth at a glance

Aspirational targets have been set across the three pillars to attain long term, inclusive and sustainable growth.

Prosperity Index Ranking (#)

The Legatum Institute, a London-based think tank, produces a prosperity index based on 300 indicators for 167 countries to help guide global policy makers.

Canada has moved up from 14th to 13th place in the Prosperity Index ranking.

Why it matters

This reflects both economic and social well-being by capturing all dimensions of a prosperous life for Canadians, beyond traditional macro-economic measurements.

Source: Legatum Institute

Living Standards

Median income from wages, salaries and commissions ($)

Canadian median income from wages, adjusted for inflation, rebounded sharply in 2021. It rose 3.5% during the year, according to the latest income survey data from Statistics Canada. (The data is lagged and updated only once a year.)

Average poverty gap (%)

Poverty rates in Canada inched higher post-pandemic as the government cut back COVID-19 support programs. Still, they remain at historically low levels.

Income parity across genders, races, people with disabilities (%)

Racialized Canadians earn 82 cents for every dollar that non-racialized Canadians earn. This is only a slight improvement from 81 cents in 2016.

Human Capital

Participation in adult learning (%)

While Canada experienced a decrease in the “GDP per hour worked” in 2021 potentially because of the changes in the workplaces due to COVID-19, other peer countries witnessed slight increases (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, the U.S., and the Netherlands) or maintained the same value (Finland, Germany) in 2021.

Share of Indigenous population in senior management positions (%)

The share of women in senior management positions is growing, but still well below parity.

Share of women in senior management positions (%)

In 2023, the share of management positions held by First Nations, Inuit and Métis slipped to 2.4 per cent, from 2.7 per cent a year earlier. This is less than half the Coalition’s five-per-cent aspirational target for management positions.