Newsletter Subscribe
Enter your email address below and subscribe to our newsletter
Letting Canadians ‘know when to be upset’: Introducing Benchmark Canada
Share your love
How’s Canada doing?
Countries don’t typically get report cards, and it can be simplistic to rely on rankings that try to tell you which is the happiest or safest country in the world. But it’s not just a matter of opinion; there are hard facts to be collated, assessed and compared.
Enter Benchmark Canada , a new project from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute that brings together more than 40 different metrics that measure this nation’s performance across the economy, health care, immigration and others while comparing Canada with countries that face similar issues.
Over the coming weeks, the National Post will examine many of those findings, beginning with defence, and report on what they mean for Canadians and the government that they have entrusted to use their tax dollars wisely and pragmatically.
“Every incoming government, regardless of stripe, has an incentive to portray itself in the most positive light,” said Kevin Vuong, the former Toronto MP who leads the project as a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. “Every government is going to be motivated to find the one metric, or multiple metrics, that tell the story they want to tell.”
A discussion about Canada’s debt-to-GDP standing inspired Vuong to think about how easily a national statistic could become a well-trodden political talking point. He wanted to assemble enough comparable data that readers could judge the country’s record for themselves through a global lens.
“Ultimately, it was intended to elevate the discourse so we can get past the political rhetoric,” he said.
Vuong spent about a year developing the project with specialists in Canada and abroad. Part of the idea came from his background as a tech entrepreneur, where a company’s growth can look impressive until it is compared with its peers.
“If you grow by 12 per cent, which sounds great, but the rest of the industry grew by 25 per cent, you didn’t actually do well,” he said.
He wanted the same scrutiny applied to Canada’s performance. For example, how much Canada spends on defence matters, but also, how is that money allocated among military equipment, personnel and the cost of running the Canadian Forces?
Other measures range across public and household finances, construction and business development, government services, security and living standards. There are also comparisons for infrastructure construction costs and how long it takes for Canadians to get timely service from their government when looking at Canada Revenue Agency wait times or the time it takes to process a new passport.
Across the Benchmark Canada website, Canada is usually measured against the countries belonging to the G7 or another relevant group of developed nations. Where international data cannot support a fair comparison, Vuong incorporated Canadian benchmarks, including the governments’ own service standards.
Vuong expected plenty of poor results, but he was surprised to find enough good ones to challenge some of his own assumptions. Gasoline taxes were one surprise, he said. Benchmark Canada found that Canada is ranked the second-lowest for the share of the pump price attributable to taxes among the major seven oil-producing democracies.
“It’s an important perspective for all the people who criticize how much tax we pay, which I, like most Canadians, do,” Vuong said.
But then some of the latest mortgage numbers raised some red flags for Vuong. Canada sits close to the bottom of a G7 comparison of mortgage arrears, albeit with a caveat that the definitions and reporting periods differ for each country. The Canadian Bankers Association’s latest figures put the national rate at 0.29 per cent in September, more than double its August 2022 low of 0.14 per cent.
“I knew it was getting worse. I just didn’t know to what extent,” Vuong said.
During his time as MP for the Toronto riding of Spadina-Fort York from 2021 to 2025, he heard from constituents who were struggling to pay their bills. Now, the arrears numbers gave him ample evidence of the pressure they had described.
“Sometimes you chalk it up to someone exaggerating for dramatic effect, but this was a point of concern for me,” he said.
Vuong also thinks the website may be useful for Ottawa to have a better idea of the state of the country, without the need to navigate complex data and statistics that members of Parliament may not have the right background to fully understand or even know where to look.
Benchmark Canada was designed so its measures can be sorted by House of Commons committees, but the project should be useful well beyond Parliament Hill. Someone trying to understand the cost of a transit line, for example, can look at what other developed countries have built and what they paid and then understand if Canada’s on the right track or missing the mark entirely.
“It lets everyday Canadians know when to be upset,” he said.
Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our newsletters here.
