Do you live in a smart city?

Interestingly, there is more variation in scores between rural and urban communities than between provinces. There is almost as much variation between communities of the same type in the same province as there is between the provinces themselves. Although cities in general tend to fare better than rural communities, the highest scores tend to belong to some of the least urbanized cities in Canada.

Our goal with the CLI is to emulate the inferences that would be made by a reasonable person who had access to the most recent and relevant data. Although there are few data sources with national coverage that will provide statistics for local communities, there are many data sources that describe larger regions (e.g. economic regions, provinces). Rather than act as if we have no data about specific communities, we use the data that describes their surrounding areas and adjust our inferences based on other data that we do have at the local level. This method minimizes the statistical error in the interpretations of the data at all levels. Complete descriptions of the original data can be found at http://www.ccl-cca.ca/CLI2009/AboutCLI.html#4.

Fernando Cartwright
Canadian Council on Learning