Report card doesn’t provide full picture
Those who prioritize family considerations in their decision-making to relocate to another city now have a new resource to consult.
"Canada's Top Family-Friendly Cities," a recent document released by the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (IMFC), provides a report card on 33 Canadian cities. Top-ranked cities include Calgary, Edmonton, Guelph, Kitchener and Vancouver. Lowest ranked cities are Saguenay and Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, Saint John, New Brunswick, St. John's, Newfoundland and Thunder Bay, Ontario.
Using 2006 Canadian census data and other sources, researchers Rebecca Walberg and Andrea Mrozek describe five main criteria they used to assess the cities. These included community feel, education choice, cost of living, economic strength and family independence.
Reports of this kind, particularly those with a cumulative grading structure, typically generate an "I already knew that" response from residents in favoured communities while those from the less favoured communities are quick to mount their defences and to highlight the obvious limits of such a study.
The report has its strengths, including its premise that if indices are being published to identify business-friendly or arts-friendly communities, then family-friendliness also deserves consideration. Some of the report's main criteria are entirely objective, such as the cost of living and a city's economic strength.
Commendably, the biases of the authors are stated up front. For instance, they assert, with reference to some social science consensus, "that family structure matters for children, and that children fare best on a number of indicators… when they have two married parents." They also concede that others "may value precisely the opposite of what [they] consider to be good indicators" and that those who do "should simply invert scores accordingly." This non-defensive stance and transparency makes the report easier to put in context as part of a dialogue on what is helpful to families.
On the other side of the conversation, the drawbacks must also be noted. To start with, as the researchers themselves note, no communities in PEI or the Territories met the criteria to be included in the study. Also, the five categories are somewhat arbitrary. Community feeling, which takes into account data such as green space, bike paths, neighbourhood stability and charitable donation trends, uses homicide rates as an indicator of overall community safety—a stat that can easily skew the scores.
Likewise, educational choice trumping quality of education as a criterion seems biased if the inference is that having access to a charter school or a private school is more important than what's actually taught in the schools themselves.
Finally, government aid is also seen as unappealing and intrusive in contrast to the independence offered by a strong private sector economy.
In the end, there is lots of relevant material to reflect on in this report. Families and policy makers, however, need to consider the information cautiously before using it to make any long range decisions as it is far from exhaustive and does have its limits.
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