Article content

Metro Vancouver and Toronto are Canada’s most unhappy cities. It’s worth figuring out why.

Vancouver and Toronto feature the four factors most correlated with Canadian unhappiness, according to a groundbreaking study out of UBC’s Vancouver School of Economics and McGill University.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Douglas Todd: Why are Vancouver and Toronto so unhappy? Back to video

Metro Vancouver and Toronto are known for the qualities that characterize the country’s least happy regions: Long traffic commutes, stratospheric housing prices, high population densities and large proportions of foreign-born residents.

Even though scholars have not proved these factors are the direct causes of Vancouver and Toronto residents exhibiting the least life satisfaction of 98 communities in Canada, the researchers found they are strongly correlated to residents’ lack of a sense of well-being and belonging.

In a new study titled How Happy are Your Neighbours?, John Helliwell, Hugh Shiplett and Christopher Barrington-Leigh discovered Canadians are happier in smaller towns. “We found life to indeed be less happy in the cities,” they write. “This was despite higher incomes, lower unemployment rates and higher education in the urban areas.”