The Martlet

Victoria is the second smartest city in Canada, says Maclean’s magazine.

In their Sept. 8 issue, Maclean’s covered a study published recently by the Canadian Council on Learning. Designed as part of the Composite Learning Index project, it aimed to assess Canada’s overall lifelonglearning standards.

The CCL ranked approximately 4,700 communities, assigning them a rank and judging their “smarts.”

Maclean’s framed the Composite Learning Index project more as  a handy list to brandish at cocktail parties than as respectable assessment designed to determine areas of national achievement and shortfall.

They took the raw data from the CLI, highlighted some interesting discoveries and outlined the implications of collective intelligence — but not without a bit of lively facetiousness.

On the magazine’s cover, Maclean’s presents some humorous personifications of choice Canadian cities. Mr. Vancouver is a long-haired, bearded young man in a tie-dye shirt, jeans and sandals right out of Woodstock. He smiles giddily, unaware of the surprising news hovering by his head: “Vancouver: not nearly as smart as Victoria.”

And then there’s poor Saguenay, a stout man in plaid carrying an armload of firewood, who is apparently “not smart at all, but happy.”

You wouldn’t know it from looking at him (or even from reading the feature story itself), but judging by the firewood in his arms, at least he’ll be toasty.

And what about Victoria? Victoria tied with Ottawa for the title of Canada’s “smartest” city, though on the chart we’re listed as #2, since Ottawa’s museums and “awareness of diversity” are higher.

Surprised? Proud? Look around you. These are the smartest people in the country, Maclean’s suggests.

But what does it mean, exactly, to be the “smartest” city? What counts as “smarts,” and how do we measure them?

According to the Canadian Council on Learning, our city has high marks in the “four pillars” of learning, the first of which is “Learning to Know,” which focuses on formal education opportunities and looks at academic performance exams. (Specifically, the mean scores of 15-year-old students on exams of various subjects — a somewhat limited criterion.)

A lot of the report’s determining factors rest on the presence and availability of civic structures like universities and museums, and while it takes the utilization of these establishments into account, it regrettably cannot truly rank “smartness” — a misinterpretation which Maclean’s headline reinforces.

Who’s to say that poor Saguenay chap wouldn’t have made a fantastic physics professor if only he weren’t stuck gathering wood all day? The data comes down to city offerings and opportunity more than collective enlightenment.

Similarly, the report’s subtext reveals an economic thumbprint. Household expenditure on education and the arts plays an important role in the rankings, and while this certainly reflects a collective sense of education and patronage to a degree, it also fundamentally highlights disposable income and broader economic trends.

(As anyone who’s been on a fifth-grade field trip knows, you don’t have to be smart or appreciative at all to enter a museum.) 

As the CCL and Maclean’s acknowledged, capital cities simply do better in the ranking because of an influx of capital and project funding. Demographics are conspicuously absent from the overall analysis. The ranking evaluates Canada’s communities across the board with the unspoken presumption that every city is equipped with a populace that wishes, needs, or is even in a position to be educated.

While a country made up of of well-rounded mental elites of all walks of life and ages is certainly appealing, with about 56 per cent of our population over the age of 35, it’s understandable that many cities will earn low rankings simply due to a lack of impetus to provide certain forms of education, rather than any absence of intelligence as the misleading “smarts” ranking suggests. (Saguenay, don’t despair!) The CLI had to rely on voluntarily provided information rather than a mandatory census to compile its data.

The methods behind the rankings may deflate enthusiastic bragging, but ultimately any study like this cannot be irrefutably accurate and all-encompassing. Victoria was in the top-10 most-improved cities since the study’s inception in 2006, so take heart that our city as its own entity is improving, offering greater opportunities to its citizens, no matter their brainpower.

According to the CLI, Victoria is “officially a place to learn and grow.” Canada overall is doing better than ever in achieving its education goals — and that’s something worth a smile as broad as Mr. Vancouver’s.