Research
The Ottawa Index
An anonymised aggregate of Building Threshold Scores across Ottawa rental buildings. Publishing when the sample is large enough to mean something.
Status
Not yet published. The index publishes at a minimum of fifteen verified assessments. Reporting an average from a handful of buildings would be a number without a finding, and a misleading one — early participants are self-selected toward operators who already care.
What it will report
- Mean and range of verified Building Threshold Scores across participating Ottawa buildings.
- How many reached Level 1, the statutory and life-safety floor.
- The most commonly unmet requirement, and the most commonly unmet critical item.
- The average split between items that were absent, stale, or simply in the wrong place.
- The variance between operators' self-assessments and verified scores, by test.
Method and protections
| Source | Verified audits conducted against THRESHOLD Edition 1.0. Self-assessments are excluded — only independently evidenced scores are counted. |
| Consent | Participation is opt-in and agreed in writing at engagement. No building is included without it. |
| Anonymisation | No building, address, operator or score is ever published individually. Only aggregates, and only where the cell size prevents identification. |
| Minimum sample | Fifteen buildings, across at least four distinct operators. |
| Self-selection | Stated openly in any published figure. Operators who commission an audit are not a random sample of operators, and the true population average is almost certainly lower than whatever the index reports. |
What this is not
This is not a ranking, a league table, or a naming exercise. No individual building will ever be identified. The purpose is to establish whether the gap this standard describes is general or particular — a question that matters to the standard's credibility and cannot be answered from one building at a time.