DOING A LOT OF THINGS RIGHT (IN SPITE OF) THIS HANDICAP.

three or more close friends, compared with just 67 per cent of Quebecers. People in Quebec were the least likely to participate in groups — 57 per cent compared with a national average of 65 per cent. They were the least trustful of their neighbours and of strangers and were the least likely to consider it likely a lost wallet or purse would be returned by a neighbour.

About one-third of Quebecers reported volunteering for an organization, compare with a national average of 44 per cent. The percentage of Quebecers donating to charity — 81 — was about even with the national average. But their average annual contribution of $264 was the lowest in the country, less than half the national average of $531.

More than 10 years after Kazemipur published his paper, social scientists continue to puzzle over Quebec’s outlier status on many measures of social capital. In a 2009 master’s thesis at the University of British Columbia, Mélina Longpré also lower in groups of lower socio-economic resources.”

Although French speakers around the world report lower levels of trust, no evidence has been found yet that it is a translation issue. But Stolle said the standard trust question is vague enough that it can be interpreted differently by different cultures.

“The survey questions on this have been criticized in many ways, as the question does not specify whom people should think about when they say they trust — or do not trust — others,” she said. “It turns out that people have a different radius of people in mind when they answer this question.”

She said scholars disagree on the importance of social capital and the reasons it varies from place to place. But she thinks Potter was off base to invoke social capital statistics to explain an incompetent government response to a blizzard.

Christopher BarringtonLeigh, an economics professor at McGill’s Institute for Health and Social Policy, said social capital measures typically predict general happiness. “Higher social-capital societies are also the ones which are simply happier,” he said.

But Quebec presents a paradox. Despite scoring low on trust and other socialcapital 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.