The Canadian Healthy Communities Project (CHCP) is an ambitious attempt to implement principles of health promotion and healthy public policy at the municipal level. The aim of CHCP is to foster local community organization and action around issues which threaten or may enhance residents' well-being. To participate in the project, communities must be prepared to monitor and evaluate their progress using indicators that are relevant, sensitive and easy to collect, and that will facilitate comparisons with other communities. The perils of the search for indicators which meet the criteria above coalesce around five main issues including lack of guidance about how to proceed; lack of expertise; gathering the data itself; lack of resources and finally the concern about how the results will be used. The paucity of the find is not isolated to the Canadian Healthy Communities Project, but experienced by WHO Healthy Cities Europe project participants as well. Finding one-size-fits-all indicators is doubtful given that the contextual dependence of relations are unique to each local community. This paper addresses practical and theoretical questions about the role of indicators in the CHCP.