Winnipeg, 29 June 2012: The Frontier Centre has released today the fifth edition of its Local Government Performance Index (LGPI), cataloguing who pays how much for what in which of Canada’s cities.
The Index is constructed to shed light on how Canada’s municipalities are performing in comparison to others.
It is designed as a living database in which users can browse the data, and where after going through a simple registration process they are allowed to add, challenge, and change data in the Index. The Index is housed at www.lgpi.ca
The Index presents financial data from the financial statements of approximately 100 of Canada’s largest cities and uses census data to divide the figures by the number of households in each city.
For example, if a user wanted to know how much police and fire services cost to the average household across Albertan municipalities, she could go to Browse Metrics, and find that Wood Buffalo outspends other Albertan municipalities by almost two dollars to one.
On the other hand, it is possible to compare two cities for all of their financial statistics, as in Calgary and Edmonton.
Aside from the data itself, the Index also assesses the quality of reporting by cities. Some cities such as Saanich score highly with their generously informative reporting, while others offer bare minimum detail.
The Index aims to make municipal performance a point of informed discussion by introducing the element of comparison. Only by comparison to other municipalities is it possible to assess how well a given municipality is performing.
For further comment please contact:
David Seymour
Fellow, Frontier Centre for Public Policy
(507) 788-0125
David Seymour is a Fellow of the Frontier Centre. He was a senior policy analyst with the Centre from 2008-2011. His latest published work is Birth of a Boom: Saskatchewan’s dawning golden age.
