Listen to the Eh Sayers podcast to meet the people behind the data and explore the stories behind the numbers. Join us as we meet with experts from Statistics Canada and from across the nation to ask and answer the questions that matter to Canadians.
Tegan: Welcome to Eh Sayers, a podcast from Statistics Canada, where we meet the people behind the data and explore the stories behind the numbers. I'm your host, Tegan Bridge.
If I were to ask you, "How happy are you?" What would you say? How about, "On a scale from 1-10, with 1 being the least happy you can imagine being and 10 being the most, what is your level of happiness?" What factors do you take into account? Did you eat a good breakfast this morning? Did you have an argument with your spouse? Maybe did you just get that promotion at work? Or maybe you're on a plane flying off to Spain's Costa del Sol or Tokyo for a vacation. If that's the case, I have to ask, please take me with you! Or, you know maybe you're feeling pretty neutral because you're doing the dishes or commuting to work. Normal things.
All of these factors affect your happiness moment to moment, but what about your life more broadly?
Capital H happiness, the feeling of general satisfaction with your life, is affected by many things: your relationships with friends, family, your partner, your satisfaction with your job and income, your health. The list goes on.
One interesting aspect to consider is the ways the place you live impact your capital H happiness. This is one area of study explored in a special edition of StatCan’s Insights on Canadian Society.
Lauren: Today, we're going to be focusing on talking about geography, which is one of my favourite ways to think about data. Um, so one of the things that we've done in the last few years is we've collected information about well-being and quality of life among Canadians through a survey called the Canadian Social Survey. And then when we're able to put a few of those, combine a few of those waves together, we're able to look at where people live and how that might influence what they're answering on the survey.
Tegan: Hi! Who's this?
Lauren: Hi there. I'm Lauren Pinault. I am the Chief of an Emerging Issues Section at Statistics Canada.
Tegan: What are some of the assumptions at play when we're talking about the place that you live and how that affects your well-being?
Lauren: When people decide where to live, they consider a lot of factors like affordability, whether they have friends or family around, a good job, access to different things like, you know, cultural festivals or things like that. So I think that in some ways, um, people sort of select where to live based on what suits them and the extent that they have a choice over where they choose to live. But we're considering well-being, and that's a really complicated idea. So some characteristics that might make a place great to live might not apply to all people. So for example, I really like to, you know, go hiking in the outdoors and I live in sort of the area outside of Ottawa where I can get access to nature. That's great for me, but what might work for me doesn't necessarily work for a friend of mine who really wants access to shops and restaurants and wants to live in the downtown core. So this isn't really a one size fits all approach.
Tegan: Generally speaking, how happy are Canadians?
Lauren: So on average, about half, so actually it's right around that 50% mark, are reporting on a scale of 1 to 10, that they have a high life satisfaction, so they're happy. So they're reporting a scale of 8, 9, or 10 on that scale.
Tegan: And which province was the happiest and maybe which was the least happy?
Lauren: So the happiest province, and it seems to come out of every cycle we ask, seems to be Quebec. Quebec, 59% of people report really high life satisfaction, and in close race, Newfoundland and Labrador, with 56% of people reporting high life satisfaction.
Tegan: And what about the least happy?
Lauren: So, the ones that measured the lowest on that scale were Ontario, with 46% of people reporting happiness. And then British Columbia and Alberta were tied at 47%.
Tegan: And why is that? What do these relatively happy and unhappy provinces, what do they Respective—, respectively, what do they have in common?
Lauren: Oh, I wish I knew the answer to that. I think that, you know, the way that we do a lot of science is very iterative. So we're measuring the, the what right now, this study answers the, where are we seeing these patterns?
And then the next study that we would follow up and do would answer the why, like, why are we seeing these differences? You know, that's, that's the golden question.
Tegan: But you didn't just look at happiness across provinces. You also looked and compared small towns versus big cities. Could you talk about that?
Lauren: So what we did in our study is we came up with a way to sort of classify all the places where people live from the most urban to rural. And so we wanted to get away from that really simple dichotomy of urban and rural because that's really way too simplistic a way to think about data. So we made up a new system that also considers the overall population size, the population density, and how close you live to other large urban centers.
And what we found when we looked at our statistics through that lens was that people in rural areas were slightly more likely to report being happy. And this really, this ranged, including areas from the most rural and remote to smaller cities with fewer than 100,000 people that were not influenced by other large urban centers.
Conversely, we found that people in the largest cities were less likely to report high life satisfaction. But as I mentioned, I wanted to caution, like, this is on, this is an average, you know, measurement, and there's a lot of people who are quite happy to live in urban centers as well. It doesn't mean that they're, you know, devoid of happiness either.
Tegan: I will say, I'm from Toronto. I don't I think I'm miserable, but…
Lauren: No, not at all. So I mean, it's really, this is really, this is a, as I said, like this, this sort of gets at the, what we're seeing in terms of patterns, but in terms of understanding why we're seeing that we're not quite there yet. And it might just be that maybe some of those people in large urban centers don't have as many choices about where they live. They may face affordability challenges, or there may be other things at play that we don't really understand yet.
Tegan: When you're looking to measure life satisfaction, there are more ways to get a sense of where people are at than just asking them upfront, "how satisfied are you with your life?"
Lauren: Right? And so one of the other ways that we did measure well-being is through that sense of belonging to your local community. And what we saw in terms of patterns when we looked at that was a little bit different than what we saw when we thought about life satisfaction.
So, again, well-being’s such a complicated idea, we want to look at it through a bunch of different lenses. We did see this different pattern, and so what we were noticing was that the lowest level of sense of belonging, so the people who were least likely to report having that sense of belonging, were people in the commuter communities outside of Canada's largest urban centres.
For example, in the city of Hamilton, which is really well influenced by Toronto, we had 43% of people reporting a strong sense of belonging. But that was only slightly lower than what was reported within the city of Toronto, which was 44%.
On the other hand, the sense of belonging in really remote and rural areas was quite high. So for example, there was a small town in Newfoundland called Baine Harbour and another town called Westport where almost three quarters of people, so 74%, reported that really strong sense of belonging to their community. And again, we don't have a strong explanation why yet, but there could be a lot of influences at play, such as, you know, how well, how well integrated you are in your social fabric. If you have a long commute, that sucks up a lot of your day, and how well maybe you know your neighbors and people around you.
Tegan: Because I would have thought, oh, maybe that's the best of both worlds: the big city job opportunities, plus the happiness boost that you seem to get of living in a small town by living in one of these commuter towns, but that's just not the case necessarily.
Lauren: It might not be. But then again, that's not the pattern we're seeing for overall life satisfaction. So, I mean, this might present a really great opportunity for some people. Again, it's not a one size fits all approach. But yeah, I guess for some people living in these communities, it does create some barriers in terms of their, you know, their overall sense of belonging in their own community. Especially if they might need to commute to another place to work.
Tegan: So, what are some of the other dimensions of happiness and how they might play out, you know, across Canada and between these rural communities and big cities?
Lauren: Yeah. So, I mean, we, we looked at a lot of different lenses, um, and beyond just that sort of life satisfaction and sense of belonging.
One of the other ones we looked at was the sense of loneliness. So, whether or not people report that they always or often feel lonely. And we always had thought, you know, going into this, that we had this assumption that loneliness was very geographically driven. So perhaps if you're part of that rural older population, you might be more prone to loneliness, or maybe if you're a newcomer to Canada and you're in a large gateway center, you might feel that loneliness as well. But we didn't see a large amount of geographic variation when we mapped the data. So, actually, what we found was that there was not a strong geographic pattern for loneliness. And this was really interesting for us to learn that loneliness is just a problem everywhere, regardless of if you live in a rural or urban area.
So, unfortunately, where you live doesn't solve all of our problems.
Tegan: What about the share of people who said that they had someone who might be able to help them when they really needed it? In a crisis, they had someone they could call.
Lauren: Yeah, so I mean what we found when we mapped that one is that there was a lot of variation and it didn't really divide along that urban and rural line. For example, we noticed that there were a smaller percentage of people reporting having to someone to count on in those big, big cities, big cities like Toronto and Vancouver, for example, but that percentage was also lower in a lot of rural regions in some provinces. So we saw lower percentages in Alberta and Ontario, for example. So it really varied and we don't really understand why we're seeing these patterns, but again, this is something that we'd love to follow up on and better understand.
Tegan: If you could sum it up what have we learned?
Lauren: So that's a great question. What I get out of this is that, you know, considering geography when we look at social statistics is a totally new lens to better understand the patterns that we're seeing. We pull things apart by age and gender and other variables, but what's really interesting sometimes is to pull it apart by geography because we learn about new patterns that we didn't know existed.
And the other thing that we learn is that geography really matters. Like, there's something about where you live that influences some of these variables we're measuring. And, you know, we need to follow up to better understand how these all fit together in terms of what's driving what we're seeing in the data.
Tegan: Why do these findings matter?
Lauren: Well-being matters to all of us. So it's obviously a priority for the government to understand how Canadians are doing. And so how we go about this is measuring all of these different facets of well-being, which include things like life satisfaction, your hopefulness about the future and all these important things. And understanding where in Canada you live and how this may influence what you answer on these surveys is really important as well.
Tegan: Is there anything you would have liked to include in your release but couldn't, or maybe has this given you any ideas for future studies?
Lauren: Well, I'm glad you asked because we do want to better understand why we're seeing these patterns. I think that's the most interesting question if we were to delve into that.
And so we do measure other things on these surveys, you know, different sort of situations about how much money households make, or things like that about their living situation. So I think what we'd like to do eventually is to better understand why we're seeing these patterns in the geography, and be able to explain some of these trends that we're seeing in a better way.
I guess the only other thing I would mention is that another consideration that we have is that we're thinking a lot about the idea of agency over your life, being a big influence over your overall well-being.
And so one of the things that we have not asked yet, but I think would be very interesting would be whether or not you choose where you live or whether you're sort of in a situation because you have to be there, whether it be for a job or some other reason. So I wonder how much of your well-being is really influenced by having that choice over where you want to live in Canada.
Tegan: You've been listening to Eh Sayers. Thank you to our guest, Lauren Pinault. You can read her full article in a special edition of Insights on Canadian Society. You can find a link in the show notes for this episode or check out the StatCan website.
You can subscribe to this show wherever you get your podcasts. There, you can also find the French version of our show, called Hé-coutez bien! If you liked this show, the best way to support us is by leaving a rating or a review on your podcast directory of choice. Thanks to username BDebney, who wrote, "What a great podcast. The optics discussed are very interesting and provide great perspective on issues that Canadians care about." Thank you so much, we really appreciate it. As always, thanks for listening.