The Mowat Centre has created a map of the areas where Canadians are not thriving, based on health district data. Unfortunately, these often cover huge areas and mix both cities and regions. In many regions data is not available. Other projects, such as the recent Faculty of Extension project of early childhood well-being in Alberta have previously shown just how difficult it is to correlate information collected by school district, with socioeconomic information and household data collected on the basis of census areas. The various areas overlap but do not correspond with each other.
This restates the spatialisation of Canada in terms of well-serviced metropolitan centres and unserviced frontiers, notably in the north. Where regions do score better it is because of the presence of large cities, such as Edmonton and Fort McMurray for the case of northern Alberta (Wood-Buffalo) in comparison to northern British Columbia.
-Rob Shields, University of Alberta