Canada has slipped to 18th place in the global World Happiness Report, down three spots from last year and placing it among the “largest losers” in happiness rankings over the last two decades, according to the annual report released Thursday.
At its peak, in the 2015 report, Canada had placed fifth. At 18th, Canada has dropped to its lowest-ever position since the polling began in 2005. The United States has also dropped to its lowest-ever position at 24th, having previously peaked at 11th place in 2012. The U.K. fell to 23rd.
Finland once again came out on top, named the happiest country in the world for the eighth year in a row in the annual report published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford.
“In general, the Western industrial countries are now less happy than they were between 2005 and 2010,” notes the report. “In 2013, the Top 10 countries were all Western industrial countries, but now only seven are.”
While the country rankings are based on asking people to rate their own lives, the authors use six variables that can help explain the variation between countries: Having someone to count on, GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity and perceptions of corruption.
Canada ranked 15th and 16th globally for perceptions of corruption and GDP, respectively, but 35th for social support and 68th for freedom to make life choices. About 18 per cent of Canadians in the report said they were dissatisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives.
There’s a tendency for people to think of happiness as a personal issue and a person’s own responsibility, but researchers believe that’s not always the case, said Felix Cheung, a Canada Research Chair in population well-being and assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Toronto.
“When one person is unhappy, that’s an individual issue,” said Cheung, who is also a co-author of the World Happiness Report as well as the 2024 Canadian Happiness Report.
“But when a country is unhappy, this is a structural issue — and a structural issue requires a structural problem.”
A downward trend
This year’s decline is a continuation of a downward trend for Canadians. The 2024 Canadian Happiness Report, for instance, found that Canadians’ assessment of their quality of life has steadily declined over the last decade — driven largely by Canadians younger than 30.
And disadvantaged groups experience lower life satisfaction. The least satisfied groups in the Canadian Happiness Report included members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, people with low income, and First Nations, Métis and Inuit people. Canadians experiencing poor mental health were the least satisfied with their lives.
So while overall happiness has dropped, it tends to be concentrated within certain groups, which is concerning, explains Cheung. He believes investing in youth mental health could be Canada’s “best bet” to improve collective happiness.
There has been a shift in what it means to be a young person in Canada, Cheung said, citing housing affordability and a sense of uncertainty that was only exacerbated by COVID, when one might assume happiness started declining.
“They feel that working hard doesn’t necessarily allow them to move up that social ladder. And that is something we need to pay attention to.”
In honour of the UN’s International Day of Happiness, we asked people what brings them joy in life?
What makes people happy?
In the new World Happiness Report, Canada’s economy played a large role in its ranking, but human connections mattered, too.
Researchers say that beyond health and wealth, some factors that influence happiness sound deceptively simple: sharing meals with others, having somebody to count on for social support and household size. In the U.S., for example, more people tend to eat lunches and dinners alone. This is especially true for younger people.
The U.S. ranked 69th for meal-sharing, but Canada didn’t come out much better at 53rd, or an average of 8.4 meals shared per week. Researchers linked sharing meals with well-being.
Believing in the kindness of others is also much more closely tied to happiness than previously thought, according to the latest findings. And people are also more helpful than we think they are.
As an example, the report suggests people who believe that others are willing to return their lost wallet is a strong predictor of the overall happiness of a population. And actual rates of wallet return are around twice as high as people expect.
One of the studies researchers looked at happened in Toronto, by comparing experimentally dropped wallets with large samples of answers from Toronto respondents to the Canadian General Social Survey, according to the report.
The expected rate of return was 23 per cent. The actual return was over 80 per cent.
“People are much too pessimistic about the benevolence of others,” notes the report.
Afghanistan ranked last
The study was done in partnership with the analytics firm Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. About 100,000 people in 140 countries and territories are polled each year, and in most countries, about 1,000 people are polled either by phone or face to face.
“Happiness isn’t just about wealth or growth — it’s about trust, connection and knowing people have your back,” said Jon Clifton, the CEO of Gallup. “If we want stronger communities and economies, we must invest in what truly matters: each other.”
Besides Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden remain the Top 4 and in the same order.
While European countries dominate the Top 20 in the ranking, there were some exceptions. Despite the war with Hamas, Israel came in at eighth. Costa Rica and Mexico entered the Top 10 for the first time, ranking at sixth and 10th respectively.
Afghanistan is again ranked as the unhappiest country in the world, with Afghan women saying their lives are especially difficult. Sierra Leone in western Africa is the second unhappiest, followed by Lebanon, ranking the third from the bottom.
Part of the goal of the report is to reflect on what defines the success of a nation, explained Cheung.
“We believe that happiness should be part of that conversation.”
