Article Synopsis
The City of Nanaimo’s Monitoring Strategy provides a structured system to track progress on its City Plan: Nanaimo ReImagined, ensuring long-term goals translate into observable community outcomes. It defines 21 areas of impact across Green, Connected, Healthy, Empowered, and Prosperous goals, measured through 23 key indicators and secondary metrics that capture environmental, social, and economic conditions. The strategy is designed for city officials, planners, and stakeholders to make data-driven decisions, align municipal actions with community priorities, and support regional economic development. Results are shared publicly via a dynamic web dashboard for transparency and ongoing evaluation.
Cities set big goals all the time, but how do you know they’re actually happening? Nanaimo has turned to a surprising source of inspiration – a local sweet treat – to track its progress.
The City of Nanaimo’s new Monitoring Strategy is designed to make sure City Plan: Nanaimo ReImagined does not become a shelf document. The strategy creates a system for watching the signals that show whether the community is moving toward the future it voted for.
The strategy acts as a companion to the City’s Integrated Action Plan, which organizes City actions into a four-year implementation cycle. The Monitoring Strategy is the measurement lens that sits beside that plan. It defines what success looks like and how it will be tracked. The purpose is simple. If Nanaimo wants long-term planning to guide real-world priorities, then progress must be visible, consistent, and comparable over time. The Monitoring Strategy supplies the structure that turns policy into observable change.
How the Approach Works
The City adapted its method for selecting indicators from the MultiCapital Scorecard. This is a triple bottom line performance system that evaluates environmental, social, and financial well-being through a single coherent lens. Rather than treating each area as a separate agenda, the MultiCapital approach asks a set of practical questions. What community issues is the City trying to solve? Where does municipal action create real impact? Which conditions in the city and region define long-term sustainability?
The process links policy goals to specific community issues and then to the data that can show what is improving, what is declining, and where new approaches are needed.
What Will be Measured
The strategy identifies 21 areas of impact across the five City Plan goals: Green, Connected, Healthy, Empowered, and Prosperous. These are distilled into an initial suite of about 23 key indicators, supported by flexible secondary measures. The result is a compact set of signals that describe community health and move beyond ineffective metrics.
These areas are monitored because they reflect the conditions that shape daily life: water availability, emissions trends, access to basic needs, road safety, housing, equity in civic spaces, and the local economy’s capacity to support a strong workforce. Regular measurement allows the City to adjust actions and investments in real time.
The results are shared through a public dynamic web dashboard called the Nanaimo Monitoring Bar, with annual check-ins and a deeper review every four years aligned to Council cycles and the Integrated Action Plan. Adapted from the Doughnut in Doughnut Economics, this “Nanaimo Bar” is our city’s visual representation of how the five areas are measured. Similar to the Doughnut, there is the ecological ceiling (which we can’t overshoot), represented by Green, and the social foundation (which we can’t shortfall on), represented by Connected, Healthy, Empowered, and Prosperous.
What the Strategy Enables Right Now
The following topic areas are aligned with the Monitoring Strategy:
- A Green Nanaimo: work includes freshwater testing through the Regional District, reservoir level management at Jump Lake, monitoring of environmental flows that support salmon, municipal waste diversion tracking, and a remote sensing pilot that maps shifts in the urban tree canopy.
- A Connected Nanaimo: work includes new methods to measure car-free access to daily needs and ongoing Vision Zero inspired road safety tracking.
- A Healthy Nanaimo: indicators pull together homelessness counts, shelter availability, vacancy and affordability metrics and access to recreation and cultural services.
- An Empowered Nanaimo: indicators track civic participation, voter turnout, and the accessibility and equity of parks, events and City facilities.
- A Prosperous Nanaimo: indicators monitor workforce sufficiency, unemployment trends, and other economic signals that guide how the City supports jobs and investment.
Essentially, data identifies gaps, gaps point to actions, and actions get re-evaluated the following year. As the dashboard grows, the public can see how choices translate into outcomes.
A Shift in How Decisions are Made
The Monitoring Strategy moves the City toward a decision model based on multidimensional well-being. This aligns with changes happening at the federal level. Canada has been expanding its Quality of Life Framework, which asks federal departments to judge policy choices on equity, sustainability and well-being rather than single-bottom-line metrics alone.
Where Economic Development fits in
Nanaimo Prosperity Corporation is already applying Living Systems and Doughnut thinking to guide regional enterprise and investment, and shared indicators allow the City and NPC to identify priorities and align key efforts. A unified measurement approach strengthens grant applications, attracts mission-aligned investors, and helps shift capital and operating decisions toward long-term resilience.
In practice, the Monitoring Strategy converts policy intent into observable changes, becoming the litmus test that shapes our city. A city cannot manage what it cannot see, and these goals prove their value when indicators reveal which thresholds we are approaching and which needs remain unmet.
