New Zealand’s “Wellbeing Budget” — A model Ontario and Canada should adopt.

There’s been a fair bit of discussion about New Zealand’s “wellbeing budget”. Cass Sunstein is a fan — here’s the intro to his take in Bloomberg:

New Zealand’s Labour coalition government has done something that could prove historic. Led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, it has produced the world’s first “wellbeing” Budget, focused explicitly on a single goal: using its limited funds to promote the wellbeing of its citizens.

Among other things, a lot of money will be devoted to three problems: mental illness, child poverty and family violence.

I’ve spent some time going through the Budget, and I’m not convinced it’s all that different than what, say, the Canadian government has been doing over the Trudeau years, I do like how New Zealand presents what they’re trying to accomplish.

New Zealand’s Treasury has a Living Standards Dashboard, where they track how the country is performing on a variety of different indicators. Here’s a sample:

The Budget then highlights a few of these, and designs policies to address them:

I would love to see this approach in Canadian and Ontario budgetmaking:

• A dashboard of Canada/Ontario’s performance indicators on a number of domains. The Conference Board’s How Canada Performs would be an excellent starting point.
• Picking out a handful of issues (say 5), with the associated indicators, where the government believes it can improve with smart policy.
• A policy (or suite of policies) designed to improve Canada/Ontario’s performance on those issues.

It would be great if, say, Ontario Liberal leadership candidates were asked this: What are the five issues where Ontario can best improve its performance, and what are the policies the province needs to do so.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting my list of issues and indicators for Ontario.