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Social indicators, which have had a long history in Canada and elsewhere, have recently attracted a lot of attention as potential monitors of social change. The purpose of this report is to propose options as to how social indicators may be used by the evaluation group of Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC) to measure the impacts of such block federal-provincial funding arrangements as the Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST).

Being able to evaluate such initiatives as the CHST is both important and difficult. Evaluation is important in light of the demands increasingly expressed by Canadians for accountability in government programming. Evaluation is made difficult by the fact that it has never been easy to disentangle the net contribution of public programs to the economy from the effects of other more influential forces such as economic and demographic change. And attribution is all the more difficult in light of the multiple levels of government — federal, provincial, and municipal — involved in new social funding arrangements.

This report contains four chapters in addition to this one. Chapter 2 presents a rationale for increasing efforts to make programs, particularly social programs, more accountable to the public. The third Chapter provides a brief review of past and recent social indicator work, with a focus on defining and typologizing social indicators and identifying their potential evaluative properties. Chapter 4 summarizes interviews that Ekos Research Associates has conducted, as part of this project, with past and current key informants in the area of social indicators. In Chapter 5 of this report presents a number of options, drawn from past and current experiences, on how social indicators, in its different forms, may be used to fulfil HRDC's new accountability responsibilities. The final chapter provides a summary and our recommendations.