The Global Liveability Index, despite its name, mostly overlooks such factors as whether people can afford shelter
Last week, Vancouver scored fifth place on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Index, below only Copenhagen, Sydney, Melbourne and Vienna.
It’s not the first time Vancouver has ranked near the top of an international city ranking, and the B.C. city actually ranked first place in the index for eight consecutive years between 2002 and 2010.
But it’s one of the more conspicuous examples of how city-ranking indices have a weakness for overlooking the fundamentals of how a place is actually experienced by its average residents.
As such, affordability, the phenomenon of “stranger attacks” and the worsening addiction crisis — the three issues that most defined Vancouver’s 2022 mayoral race — are given roughly the same attention as more arbitrary factors such as “social or religious restrictions” or “quality of water provision.”
“Prevalence of violent crime” is worth only about five per cent of the final ranking. Notably, it’s not based on actual data, such as homicide rates. Rather, it’s judged on a sliding scale from “acceptable” to “intolerable.”
Affordability is similarly an empirical figure that wouldn’t be hard for the EIU to calculate; they would simply need to compare average housing prices against average incomes. But the livability index ultimately uses empirical data for only a single category: weather.
And the EIU livability index has previously exhibited a shocking ignorance of local conditions. In 2011, for instance, Vancouver was bumped from its top spot on the index because of several recent closures of a highway on Vancouver Island. Seemingly unbeknownst to report authors was the easily Googled fact that Vancouver Island has nothing to do with the City of Vancouver, and is in fact separated from it by the Strait of Georgia.
This might be why affordability — Vancouver’s foundational issue for the last 20 years — may not actually find its way into the livability index at all. Instead, there’s simply a category called “availability of good-quality housing” whose qualitative ranking contributes only about three per cent to the final score.
The House of Commons had only just left for summer recess before Ottawa was hammered by news that, as a result of a new Liberal bill, Google and Facebook are making good on threats to cut off 40 million Canadians from many of the internet’s most well-trafficked sources of online news. The National Post’s Anja Karadeglija has the full story here, but here’s an excerpt:
Google will pull Canadian news from Google Search and its other products in Canada over legislation that would force it to share revenues with news publishers, the company announced Thursday.
The Online News Act received royal assent earlier this month. It would force Meta and Google to reach commercial deals with news publishers, to share revenues for news stories that appear on their platforms (Postmedia, publisher of the National Post, is in favour of the legislation).
The Parliamentary Budget Officer has estimated that under the bill, which is aimed at the two companies, Google and Facebook could end up funding more than 30 per cent of newsroom costs, just under $330 million a year. But if Google and Meta remove news from their platforms, they will no longer be covered under the Online News Act. That means publishers won’t be getting additional funding, and will also lose an undisclosed sum in existing deals.
