Ottawa scores highly on learning, labour, but flunks for poverty, environment

from The ottawa Business Journal

By Krystle Chow, Ottawa Business Journal Staff

Ottawa is highly educated, safer than it was years ago, and offers local residents fairly good access to medical professionals, but the city still ranks poorly in terms of the environment, arts funding and the gap between the rich and the poor, according to a new annual Vital Signs report.

The report, which is published by the Community Foundation of Ottawa, said the city in 2006 had significantly higher levels of people with post-secondary education and fewer high-school dropouts than that of Ontario and Canada.

Sixty per cent of Ottawa's population aged 15 and older had attained a university degree, post-secondary certificate or diploma last year, up from 55 per cent in 2001 and 44 per cent in 1990, and much higher than the 50-per-cent proportion recorded in Ontario and the 49-per-cent national average.

As well, the percentage of high-school dropouts was 14.6 per cent last year, compared to 21.6 per cent across the province and 23 per cent for all of Canada.

"In terms of our community's level of education and capacity to learn, we might even deserve a little collective swagger," the report read, playing on Mayor Larry O'Brien's statement in April that the city needs to "walk with (a) swagger."

The city's employment numbers were strong in 2006, with lower unemployment levels and faster job growth than what was seen nationally and provincially.

Property crime and violent crime rates have also declined significantly in the past years, the report said.

Property crime levels in 2006 fell by 1.3 per cent from the previous year and by 34 per cent since 2000, to 3,075 incidents per 100,000 people, while the number of violent crimes fell by 6.3 per cent from the previous year and by 22 per cent since 2000, to 580 incidents per 100,000 people.

The number of active family doctors and specialists per 100,000 people – 294 – has also remained stable since 1998 when the data was first collected, and Ottawa's physicians-to-population ratio is higher than that of the province, which has 177 active physicians per 100,000 people, and of Canada's overall.

However, the report pointed out that the city still has many weak points, such as the proportion of families living below the poverty line. Although the poverty level was still slightly lower than the provincial and national averages, Ottawa's proportion of families living in poverty in 2005 rose by roughly 0.6 percentage points from the level in 2000 to 70,830 families or 19 per cent of all families.

This was compared to Ontario's 21-per-cent level and the 21.7 per cent of all Canadian families living in poverty.

Meanwhile, the average annual income of Rockcliffe Park, the wealthiest neighbourhood, at $225,035 was six times greater than that of Vanier, the poorest neighbourhood which had an average annual household income of $36,312.

The city also fared poorly in terms of its environmental score, with one of the highest greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and relatively no change in the level of waste headed to the landfills from a year earlier.

The report looked at 11 areas in total in measuring Ottawa's performance as a city, including arts and culture, belonging and leadership, transportation, housing and immigration services.