Healthy Provinces, Healthy Canadians: A Provincial Benchmarking Report

This publication breaks new ground in that it benchmarks the performances of the provinces on 70 health indicators grouped into the three categories of health status, health outcomes and health-care utilization and performance. Up until now, Canada had compared itself only to leading Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. No one had undertaken an internal comparison.

This report shows which provinces are top performers and gives them a clear understanding of where their systems are strong and where they need to improve, and to which provinces they should look for best practices.

Our analysis reveals that British Columbia and Alberta are the top provincial performers, but that all the provinces have room for improvement. In Manitoba, which ranked 10th overall, improvement is particularly needed in the categories of health status and health-care utilization and performance.

We also compared Canada to 23 leading OECD countries and found that it placed 11th.