ABSTRACT
Canada was an early adopter of subjective wellbeing and measures of social connection in its mainline surveys, and has recently begun integrating an avant-garde quality-of-life framework in the federal government. Due to its federal structure, large size, and diverse Indigenous cultures and knowledge systems, it is also a challenging context for coalescing on standardized measures and approaches to wellbeing. This chapter reports on a steadily decreasing trend in measured life satisfaction across Canada over the past decade. It also surveys the prominent contributions to measuring wellbeing, to bringing evidence from it to inform decision-making, and to raising awareness and support for wellbeing as a goal in policy. These include a number of independent as well as coordinated efforts by First Nations in Canada to define, collect, and curate wellbeing data. A nascent country-wide civil society effort aims to bring a network of governments and practitioners together to share evidence and experience and to ensure that a shift towards wellbeing policy in the central government remains on course. While there is plenty of evidence of the effectiveness of policies targeting important determinants of wellbeing, there is relatively little evidence about the effectiveness of a wellbeing orientation to policy, overall.
