Jessica George
The age-old fight heard on the playground is “Look at what my dad can do” while performing some outrageous feat that the next kid responds to with, “Well, my dad can do it better than your dad.”
But now the arguments have been blown out of the water with statistics which allow some communities to say, “Yeah, well my whole town is smarter than yours!”
The Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) recently released the data found in a three-year long Composite Learning Index (CLI) which was developed as a way to gauge the progress of learning in Canada.
The data is displayed as an online, interactive map where you can click on one of 4,700 communities Canada-wide to see what their score is.
According to the website, the CLI is “an annual measure of Canada’s progress in lifelong learning.” The score is derived from 17 different indicators that cover information from schooling, home life, work, and community accessibility.
All of these pieces of data then are combined to make a reflective single score.
The higher the number, the better—and Canada has been improving every step of the way.
In 2006, for instance, Canada scored a 73, which in 2007 was replaced with 76. And this year, Canada topped off at 77.
Under this index, each community is given a score. And although the organization insists the data is not to be used as a means of ranking certain communities against each other, who could resist?
Based on the data compiled for Northwestern Ontario, Fort Frances was given a score of 73.
This puts the town above the City of Thunder Bay (72), all of Quebec (average of 58) and Newfoundland (average of 52), major parts of Nova Scotia (average of 56), and the central and northern regions of Manitoba (average of 62).
It also puts us on par with the likes of Windsor and Sarnia, and various communities in British Columbia and southern Ontario.
To determine the ranking of the surrounding communities, the data has been broken down into four categories: Learning to Know, Learning to Do, Learning to Live Together, and Learning to Be.
From youth reading, math, science, and problem-solving skills to high school and post-secondary completion rates, as well as travel time to schools and colleges, Fort Frances scored 4.7 on the Learning to Know scale.
This is right on par with Canada overall, which scored a 5.0, but we rank in a little below because of the distance we need to travel to get to post-secondary institutions as well as the number of post-secondary degrees achieved.
In Learning to Do, Fort Frances scored 4.2, with our travel time to vocational schools keeping us a bit below the average mark of 5.3.
In Learning to Live Together, Fort Frances scored higher than Canada overall with a score of 5.3, which beat the national score of 4.8. The reason for our high score is our great accessibility to religious organizations.
And under Learning to Be, we have some exceptionally high ratings for access to broadband Internet (we have an astounding 97.2 percent accessibility) but significantly low score in travel to museums and galleries (totalling at around an hour-and-a-half), which settles us in around average with Canada.
A score of 73 is shared by most communities in Northwestern Ontario, except for Atikokan, Red Lake, and Emo. Those three scored 74 according to the data, placing them one spot ahead of Fort Frances, Morson, La Vallee, Morley, Chapple, Kenora, and a handful of others.
On average, these communities beat out Fort Frances because of their shorter travel times to schools, vocational schools, religious organizations, libraries, and museums and galleries. However, Fort Frances beats these communities on times to associations and on broadband accessibility.
But who’s keeping score?
In actual fact, all communities between 71.8 and 74.2 are grouped together because the scores are pretty much the same. So drop the mud and put your tongue back in your mouth and quit shouting, “Look what we can do,” because everyone else can do the same.
No competition here.
But just so everyone is aware, the Northwestern Ontario economic region in all falls in the top 24 of all economic regions across Canada. So one more chorus of “We rock” may be in order.
All of these statistics, and more, can be found at the Maclean’s magazine website (www.macleans.ca) under the link, “How Smart is your City?”
