These two Canadian provinces are the least satisfied with life: report
At the end of the day, being happy and satisfied with life is the most important thing. Or is it? When it comes to overall life satisfaction, some provinces seem like they’re better than others, and there are two you may even want to avoid entirely.
According to Statistics Canada, quality of life, or well-being, “refers to the wealth and comfort of individuals, communities and society based on both material and non-material factors that are important to people’s lives, such as health and social connections.”
“An important part of measuring quality of life is gaining an understanding of how people in Canada experience their own well-being. Overarching measures of subjective well-being provide a useful barometer of how life is going in general, and understanding the drivers of inequalities in subjective well-being can shed light on the factors that matter most in people’s lives,” said Statistics Canada.
Statistics Canada’s Quality of Life Hub shows the pulse of Canadians’ well-being by bringing together data from around 85 key indicators. Ultimately, all this information will help the federal government make future policy and budgeting decisions, but in the meantime, it’s fascinating to poke around and see where people have the highest satisfaction with life in Canada.
Using information gathered from the Canadian Social Survey, survey respondents were asked how they feel about their lives as a whole using a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is “very dissatisfied” and 10 is “very satisfied.”
Here’s a look at some of the data:
Statistics Canada
BC and Ontario are leaders in dissatisfaction
In both BC and Ontario, 27.7% of respondents reported feeling “very dissatisfied” with life. In BC, slightly more people rated being “very satisfied” (44.1%) compared to Ontario (41%), where more people tended to fall into the middle category.
Meanwhile, Quebec has the fewest (15.6%) dissatisfied people, followed by some Maritime provinces like Newfoundland and Labrador (16.8%) and PEI (16.8%).
Eastern provinces lead in satisfaction
Statistics Canada
Overall in Canada, 45.8% of people in all provinces reported being “very satisfied” with life, but some provinces are better than others.
Taking a look at the map, it’s clear that the distribution of high levels of satisfaction tends to fall more in the Eastern part of the country. BC, Alberta, and Ontario stand out as having fewer people reporting the highest category of life satisfaction.
Quebec (55.5%) and Newfoundland and Labrador (55.2%) lead in high life satisfaction.
Life satisfaction in Canada gets better with age
Statistics Canada
In the report, data is also split up by age and gender. Taking a broad look at the data, the older age categories (from ages 55 to 75+) appear to report higher levels of life satisfaction.
Between the ages of 15 and 34, overall satisfaction appears to go down before it trends just slightly upward again after age 35.
You can learn more and explore the interactive dashboard from Statistics Canada.
How would you rate your satisfaction with life in Canada? Let us know in the comments.
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