Canadians have prosperity, not real happiness
UN report obviously didn’t poll coffee drinkers at Tims
A lot of Canadians surely choked on their double-doubles this week upon learning that the UN has once again labelled us one of the happiest nations on earth.
In a country where the real national sport is bitching and moaning, preferably at Tims, it’s a blow to our malcontent pride to hear that some make-work UN body has concluded Canadians are, relatively speaking, happy campers who whistle on their way to work.
The lone consolation is that we’re on the happiness downslide with Prime Minister Justin “Sunny Ways” Trudeau at the helm, having tumbled from second to seventh place in just a handful of years. It seems, perversely, that we were happier with Mean Steven running the show than we are with PM Selfie.
Happy? Outwardly? Not us. Canadians might take quiet satisfaction in the nation’s achievements, especially with Canada’s 150th birthday this summer, but we prefer to keep the euphoria hidden under a soggy blanket of carping and self-deprecation.
Look at the company we’re keeping. The nations heading the happiness report card — beginning with Norway and including Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland — are all tidy, prosperous, honest, super-efficient models of national success. They are the richest and most successful folks in the country club, but are they the happiest? Are they — cold, anal, guiltridden and obsessed with social engineering — having the most fun? I wouldn’t bet on it. Maybe it’s a case of mislabelling. In calling its annual report card the World Happiness Report, the UN makes the classic mistake of equating prosperity, as in real GDP per capita, social support, life expectancy, generosity and perceptions of corruption, with happiness.
Most of us are aware we won the lottery in being born Canadian or landing here as an immigrant. We are the most fortunate of people. But there’s something in our collective DNA that snuffs out the joy and leaves us forever whining about our misfortune.
There’s a reason why Canadians, among the most tranquillized folks on earth, need truckloads of pharmaceuticals to make it through the day. We are not, with the notable exception of Newfoundlanders and rural Maritimers, a happy people.
Stand outside Toronto’s Union Station at rush hour and watch the commuter hordes striding, grim-faced, toward their hamster-wheel office tower jobs. The only folks more forlorn are the wretches stuck in North America’s worst expressway traffic.
Here’s the strange thing. That happiness report put Jamaica way back in 76th place, behind Hungary, and rightfully so, given its poverty and rampant crime.
With a staggering 1,350 murders last year on an island with only 2.8 million people, a homicide rate three times as bad as that of Mexico, Jamaica can be a dangerous place (especially for gang members who constitute 70 per cent of victims) and its people have every reason to be despondent.
And yet Jamaicans, if those in west-end Negril are representative, are easily the most outgoing, confident, funny and exuberant people I’ve come across in decades of travel. “You will find no shy people in Jamaica,” I was told more than once. In a country with a minimum wage of less than $2 an hour and scant social services, they’ve opted to embrace life to the fullest. That larger-than-life Usain Bolt Olympic personality radiates from a lot of his fellow Jamaicans.
It begs the question. Who is happier, the Bay Street businessman burning midnight oil for big bucks and the occasional tropical holiday? Or the Rastafarian I met who’s been taking calculated running leaps off a three-storey cliff for 30 years, since the age of 16, just clearing the ominous beds of razor-sharp coral below, for tourist dollars?
“Have you ever screwed up?” I naively asked. “If I had ever screwed up, I would not be here talking to you,” he replied with a charitable grin.
Canadians are nice people. But when it comes to making the leap from misery to happiness, my money is on the Jamaicans.