Nathan White
Telegraph-Journal
Appeared on page A1
Saint John is the happiest city in Canada, according to a research study out of the University of British Columbia. The Port City is one of several Atlantic Canadian burgs to score well on the Life Satisfaction and Quality of Development study. Charlottetown comes in third after Quebec City, while Moncton ties for fourth with Kitchener, Ont. St. John's, N.L. (sixth) and Halifax (tenth) also cracked the top ten.
John Helliwell, an economics professor at UBC, has presented the study at conferences in several countries. It's been gaining recognition recently since being presented at the Gallup Global Well-Being Forum in Washington, D.C. in October, Helliwell said.
Sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the study is based on survey data provided by Statistics Canada. It examines close to 100,000 responses to StatsCan's Ethnic Diversity Survey of 2002 and the General Social Survey of 2003.
Helliwell's study examines responses to questions on things like life satisfaction and trust, and uses geocoding to determine results for various communities. "The magic is to find out, not only how happy people are with their lives, but to situate them in communities (and) explain why people who are happy are happy," he said.
Saint John led the pack with a life satisfaction score of 8.6 out of 10, which Helliwell said makes it among the happiest cities not only in Canada, but the world.
"That's pretty high," he said. "Denmark is the highest country and runs about 8.1 or 8.2. Saint John is operating in pretty rarified territory, so something's going well."
Moncton, the only other New Brunswick city in the study, scored 8.2, and both tied for second when it comes to trust in neighbours, behind only Charlottetown. Helliwell said that's no coincidence. "Trust is important: it's the contacts between people and the extent to which they live in a trusting environment," he said. "The extent people have others they can rely on, spend time with family, friends and neighbours. And trust in the workplace turns out to be very important as well."
Those kinds of connections are easier to come by in smaller cities than in major centres like Toronto and Vancouver, whose large populations lead to less personal interaction and more turnover.
"Having a community that's stable enough to get to know people is important. That's one of the advantages of a community that's not subject to the big turnover major metropolitan areas are," Helliwell said. "You have a chance to see people regularly. Clerks in stores are (more likely to be) their friends, not just somebody trying to sell you something "¦ That's harder to do in big cities."
Helliwell said he'd like to see a greater focus on this type of qualitative research when it comes to gauging the development of countries, as opposed to strict economic measures.
"Life satisfaction is an alternative way of approaching development," he said. "We need to stop just looking at GDP per capita and look at the quality of people's lives."
