While in no way intending to minimize the economic hardship inflation has had on Canadian’s lives, to be clear, this is ‘standard of living’ defined as real GDP per capita.

That is it measures the arithmetic mean or average of what the economy produces adjusted for general inflation. It says nothing about how income or wealth is distributed or other key factors that determine wellbeing at an individual, household or societal level.

This is not generally viewed as the best measure of quality of life or societal wellbeing. Critics from across the political spectrum globally have been critical of the focus on GDP per capita for decades. It says something that TD as a bank is still focused on it.

The OECD Finance Ministers adopted a Wellbeing Framework to measure and compare across countries. Canada has its own version that StatsCan is reporting on.