Madam Chair, if it is our collective hope as parliamentarians to not only see GDP growth but to actually enhance the quality of life for the Canadians who live in our communities, in my view, it is essential that we become more effective at measuring the things that matter. To me, it is important that we understand there is value in a forest before we cut it down, that the time we spend at home is every bit as valuable as the time we spend at work and that the people in our lives are every bit as important and certainly more important than the money in our bank accounts.
On the issue of quality-of-life indicators, I want to acknowledge the leadership of a group in my province of Nova Scotia, Engage Nova Scotia, and the head of that organization, Danny Graham, in particular, for his groundbreaking work on establishing quality-of-life indicators.
To illustrate the importance of this point, when people call my constituency office, they are not calling about Canada's GDP growth the month prior. They are calling about whether they have access to mental health services and whether they can manage to put food on the table for their families. Though they might be watching the monthly job statistics in the abstract, they are very concerned whether they and their kids have an opportunity to find a job in the community where they grew up.
In this recent federal budget, we have taken a major step to implement indicators where we can track the impact that the measures are going to have on the quality of our constituents' lives and not only on the macroeconomic indicators we traditionally rely on, like unemployment rates or GDP. Certainly, those traditional economic indicators are extremely important.
Could the minister highlight some of the investments made in budget 2021 as a result of these indicators and what are the next steps to implement a quality-of-life framework to ensure that, going forward, governments make decisions based on how they will improve the quality of life for Canadians rather than simply GDP?