Vital Signs Skewed By Sampling

The Vancouver Foundation's Vital Signs 2007 report card is an ambitious and, we can only hope, ultimately useful document.

We can agree whole-heartily and sadly with our failing scores in transportation, the gap between rich and poor and housing. And we can question the citizen grading panel's B rating for arts and culture. Have they never travelled?

However, there is an underlying problem with all of this, and that is the methodology of the study.

The citizen panels came from "over 400 civic, non-profit and business leaders and other informed members..."

What about UNinformed citizens, ordinary Joes and Janes? The panelists are the usual suspects, the haves, the elites, the blithely comfortable.

The organizations involved included people like the Social Planning and Research Council of BC, a typical make-work project for bureaucrats.

Ask the artists and actors and directors and dancers about the state of Art in Vancouver. Ask the immigrant about putting his Masters degree to work.