TORONTO STAR reports:
Canadians are a cheery bunch — but Quebecers are the cheeriest of us all, according to a new United Nations report on the state of global happiness.
The first-ever World Happiness Report revealed that the last 25 years have been especially satisfying for francophone Quebecers, compared to Canadians in other provinces.
“(They) have had, in the decades following Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, steadily growing life satisfaction compared to residents of the rest of Canada,” the study said, suggesting favourable “social changes” outweigh income growth.
The study, unveiled Monday April 2 at the UN’s three-day Conference on Happiness, hosted by Kingdom of Bhutan, also found the world as a whole has become a “little happier” in the last 30 years.
As a country, Canada ranked fifth behind a quartet of northern European nations — Denmark, Finland, Norway and the Netherlands, in that order — but well ahead of the United States and the United Kingdom, which ranked 11th and 18th, respectively out of 156.
Pointing to the “five important facets of life” — family, good health, income, sense of freedom and lack of corruption — Canada performs better than the United States in all but income, said John Helliwell, a University of British Columbia economist and co-editor of the 155-page report.
The five least-happy countries are Burundi, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Benin and, lastly, Togo.
The goal of the study, Helliwell said, is to compel governments to consider citizens’ happiness level when making policy decisions.
“It’s being used as part of an effort to show governments that there’s a real science behind the measurement of happiness,” Helliwell said of the report, which he co-edited with economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.
The report found that while income is an important barometer of well-being — richer countries do tend to be happier — it is only one factor.
“While basic living standards are essential for happiness, after the baseline has been met happiness varies more with quality of human relationships than income,” it says.
Said Helliwell: “A lot of things that produce happiness don’t take any resources at all.”
