A report from Statistics Canada called "How’s Life in the City? Life Satisfaction Across Census Metropolitan Areas and Economic Regions in Canada" was released recently, which purports to rank Canadian cities according to their subjective well-being or "life satisfaction", i.e. how good the residents feel their lives are.
My own hometown of Toronto languishes down near the bottom of the list, with only Vancouver (yes, Vancouver, B.C., commonly referred to as La-La Land) below it, but both cities score at around 7.8 out of 10, which is still pretty happy. The top of the list is dominated by smaller cities, especially those in Quebec and Newfoundland, although, to put this into perspective, even the top scores are only around 8.2.
To put this even further into perspective, on a global scale, Canada now ranks the fifth happiest in the world, according to the latest World Happiness Report, up from sixth last year, and only narrowly surpassed by Switzerland (really?!), Iceland, Denmark and Norway. These five all had scores of between 7.4 and 7.6, as compared to the lowest five on the scale (Rwanda, Benin, Syria, Burundi and Togo), whose scores range from about 3.4 right down to a dismal 2.8 in the case of last-placed Togo.
This international index takes into account a variety of factors, including income, healthy years of life expectancy, availability of social support, generosity and charity giving, perceptions of corruption in government and business, and individuals' perceptions of their personal freedoms, and so is not necessarily directly comparable to the Stats Canada index, which is limited to subjective responses to a simple question, "how do you feel about your life as a whole right now?"
It kind of makes me happy I don't live in west or central Africa, though.
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