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But Quebec presents a paradox. Despite scoring low on trust and other social-capital measures, Quebecers have risen to the top among Canadians when asked to rate how satisfied they are with life on a scale of zero to 10. In fact, Barrington-Leigh found that when Quebec was compared with the countries of the world, its reported happiness in 2010 was second only to Denmark.

“We’re doing something right in Quebec — doing a lot of things right in terms of building good lives for people — and yet we’re doing that in spite of this apparent handicap,” he said.

He speculated that part of the explanation for the social capital handicap goes back to the Quiet Revolution, when Quebecers largely abandoned the church.

“In Quebec, we quite suddenly lost a lot of the institutions that were the glue and physical embodiment of that social capital,” he said. “People who used to have their social networks and their meeting places and so on through church, in less than a generation that disappeared. It’s a question of how many generations does it take to rebuild those kinds of institutions.”

Kazemipur, who wrote the 2008 book Social Capital and Diversity, noted that in the 2003 General Social Survey, Quebecers scored near the top in some social capital categories — trust in public institutions and private corporations and voter turnout.

But he said it is “absolutely necessary” for Quebec policy-makers to address the province’s low scores on components relating to inter-personal and communal relationships. If they do not, they are missing out on the economic gains and improved educational and health outcomes that research shows accompany increased social capital.

In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, the pioneer in social capital scholarship Robert Putnam wrote that “honesty and trust lubricate the inevitable frictions of social life.” Kazemipur said Quebec especially would benefit from getting things running more smoothly.

“Because of the almost consistently lower score that they have had, they have to pay much more attention to this than the rest of the country,” he said.

National Post

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