By self-reporting their happiness at greater than seven out of 10 on average, a significant increase over last year, Canadians are at their cheeriest and most optimistic place in several years, according to a new poll .
It is a tricky thing to measure, but these findings are the latest in the novel science of happiness studies, which has grown rapidly from a niche academic interest into a major factor in economic policy development, including an important new priority of Statistics Canada.
“I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that things in the country overall are closer to the pre-pandemic norm,” said Andrew Enns, executive vice-president, Central Canada, for Leger, which conducted the new poll.
It found the happiest provinces are Quebec, by a wide margin of almost five points, followed by Newfoundland and Labrador and New Brunswick.
“There’s something about Quebec, they love the moment,” Enns said. “It’s a cultural trait.”
The happiest cities are Montreal, Brampton, and Toronto. The least happy provinces are Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, and the least happy of the ten largest cities are Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Ottawa.
Financial pressure was the most common barrier to happiness that people reported, at 57 per cent of respondents, followed by physical health at 32 per cent, and mental health and uncertainty about the future, both at 23 per cent. The political situation, work-life balance, the cost of leisure activities, and loneliness were also common answers.
But with such robust findings of widespread happiness, buoyed by a comparable sense of optimism for the future, the poll suggests that happiness for Canadians rests on “deeply human dimensions,” as Leger’s report calls them, such as caring for one’s health, maintaining close friendships, trusting neighbours, having a sense of purpose, and feeling secure.
The comparison with last year’s version of the same poll is particularly revealing for how the state of the world at large can affect individual happiness, Enns said.
“When you look at what 2025 was presenting the country, we had (U.S. President Donald) Trump in full flight, we had a federal election under way, we had gone from a very unpopular prime minister to one who turned out to be very popular,” Enns said in an interview.
But the poll also shows people tend to evaluate their own happiness on an extremely local level. “People may think the world is going to hell in a handbasket,” Enns said, “but the closer your perspective gets, the better it seems.”
“Happiness to some degree is reflected by your community around you, your local group of peers, whether neighbours, colleagues. There’s a sense of trust, reliance, comfort in that support,” Enns said. Being able to say hello to a neighbour when you take out the garbage, or feeling that you trust the people around you, “some of those things bring as much happiness as having money left over from a paycheque…. That’s how people can report high happiness, while also expressing pessimism about the world.”
Asked to give a maximum of three factors that contribute to their happiness in their community, the most common response was a sense of safety and security at 46 per cent.
The next most common answer was green spaces, parks and access to nature, at 40 per cent, which was significantly higher than any of the other less common factors, such as quality of neighbourhood life (27 per cent), cleanliness and attractiveness of the area (22 per cent), and affordability, shops transit, infrastructure.
Enns said this shows that “as citizens, we’re actually sending mixed messages here, and that makes it hard for policy makers.” Voters tend to downplay the importance of the “soft sides” of life in a city, like parks and walking trails, “but their presence makes people happy, it improves their quality of life.”
This sort of counterintuitive finding is typical of the scientific field of happiness studies, which has a colourful history that runs through Canada.
Books about “hedonic psychology,” about what truly makes people happy, were all the rage in publishing in the early 2000s, and policy makers soon took note.
The most famous and quirkiest example was Bhutan, the tiny Himalayan country, which made itself into a unique science experiment by becoming the first country to track its Gross National Happiness, and it was reporting interesting results.
Until then, to economists, happiness had seemed mostly separate from the central goals of fiscal governance, such as gross domestic product. In contrast, happiness and well-being seemed either irrelevant or impossible to measure or both.
But this interest in happiness caught on at the highest levels, thanks largely to the work of John F. Helliwell, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, who ran a seminal research program on Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being at the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research.
He had shown, for example, that rising income has only a limited and relative effect on happiness, and that one of the best predictors of a random person’s happiness is how much they trust their neighbours. If happiness and well-being were going to be primary goals of governments, some of the old purely financial metrics would have to be updated.
Economists and policy makers started to take notice. In 2012, the first World Happiness Report had Canada ranked fifth overall.
The newest World Happiness Report 2026, of which Helliwell remains an editor, ranks Canada 25th, its lowest place ever since tracking began in 2010. Historically, Canada’s average life evaluation score has shown a modest but steady decline over the last 15 years.
Now, the field boasts a robust track record of data, and a generation of policy makers who have grown up with happiness in the forefront of their minds.
Statistics Canada started a Quality of Life program in 2021 to track life satisfaction among Canadians, and in its most recent review said it “has made substantial progress in establishing itself as a truly horizontal effort with clear links to the federal policy cycle.”
StatCan does not have a prepandemic measure, but it began in 2021 with a quite low initial measure of 42 per cent of Canadians saying they had a high life satisfaction.
This rose above 50 per cent and stayed there before plunging ten points to 45 per cent in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2022. Then it returned to the 50 per cent baseline again before falling to 40 per cent in the second quarter of 2024, and since then has stayed a few points below 50 per cent.
The same chart for people reporting a high sense of meaning and purpose follows a similar historical shape, with coinciding dips in 2022 and 2024, but with numbers about ten points higher. The most recent measure shows 55.7 per cent of Canadians report a high sense of meaning and purpose.
“All those things can provide a sense of how a person feels about their current situation,” Enns said
The online survey was conducted by Leger in June of this year among 63,710 Canadians, of whom about half were in Quebec, and the results have been weighted according to age, gender and region. A true margin of error cannot be calculated for this kind of online panel poll, but to compare, this many respondents in a probability sample would give a margin of error of plus or minus 0.39 per cent 19 times out of 20.
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