Community Well-being: A Comparable Communities Analysis

Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) recently developed the Community Well-Being Index (CWB). This composite indicator combined census data on income, education, housing, and labour force activity to produce “well-being” scores for individual Canadian communities. INAC’s analyses of the CWB revealed a disparity in well-being between Indian reserves and other Canadian communities. This study examines the degree to which that disparity is a function of the small size and remote locations of many reserves, as opposed to the fact that they are reserves per se. The Matching Communities 2001 (Maxim and White, 2001) analysis created by Paul Maxim and Jerry White from The University of Western Ontario provides a pair-wise comparison between reserves and matched non-reserve communities. The disparity between the reserve/non-reserve pairs was juxtaposed with that observed when all reserves and other communities are compared. Gross geography was also considered; disparities between reserves and their non-reserve matches were compared across four remoteness zones. Overall, the disparity in well-being between the matched reserve/non-reserve pairs was very similar to the disparity between the complete set of reserves and other Canadian communities. This appears to suggest that no significant portion of the disparity between reserves and other communities can be attributed to either location or population size. Once gross geography was taken into account, however, we noticed that reserve communities nearer urban areas were more similar to their non-reserve matched community than reserves in more isolated parts of the country. With few notable exceptions, the disparities between reserves and their non-reserve community matches increased with geographic isolation. Community Well-being: A Comparable Communities Analysis ii