Article content continued

As for the 25th-place ranking, you might not consider children’s ability to rattle off at least five environmental problems key to measuring their welfare. (Canada does well there.) You might think actual deprivation would be important criteria, but the 2017 report is concerned only with inequality. (Canada doesn’t do very well there.) Considerably poorer countries than Canada score better on equality measures, even as they score worse battling something as fundamental as food insecurity. Inequality matters a lot, but it doesn’t matter more than breakfast.

Furthermore, you might think the child homicide rate (where Canada does quite badly) is an odd criteria to give so much weight, given that it’s a relatively rare cause of death. If you’re going to use it, you can’t just pick a year at random, as the report does, because small numbers fluctuate significantly from year to year. It’s especially ridiculous to reward or punish a tiny country like Cyprus or Malta for having zero or one child homicide in a given year, respectively.

All that said, mouth full of salt, I suspect Canadians would be legitimately surprised to find how poorly we fare relative to other rich countries on measures everyone would agree are key to child development. Fifteen per cent of children between the ages of 11 and 15 reported being bullied at least twice a month. Based on my observations as an 11-year-old I’d call that extraordinary progress — but it’s three times higher than the rate in Sweden, Iceland, Italy and Spain. Canada’s childhood obesity rate is four times Denmark’s. Not many children are murdered in Canada, but 130 under 15 were between 2010 and 2017. That strikes me as an awful lot, and it’s a rate far higher than most other comparable nations. Canadians are likely aware of an epidemic of teenage suicides, but do they know the overall rate is fully five times that of Portugal’s? Do Canadians know infant mortality is four times higher than in Japan?