Where Potter had it right

QUEBEC’S SOCIAL CAPITAL DEFICIT IS DOCUMENTED

When An - drew Potter re signed as director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, he expressed regret for “many aspects” of the Maclean’s column that made him a pariah in Quebec.

He apologized f or the article’s “sloppy use of anecdotes, its tone, and the way it comes across as deeply critical of the entire province.” But he did not retract what arguably should have been the most disconcerting content to Quebecers. That is because, though he did not tell the whole story, he was not wrong.

In fact, over the past decade Quebecers have consistently scored below the national average on many key Statistics Canada measures of what is known as social capital. Academics blame everything from the Catholic Church’s loss of influence in the province to francophones’ minority status. But what they cannot explain is that, despite it all, Quebecers are among the happiest people in the world.

In 2003, recognizing that economic indicators alone could not measure Canadians’ well- being, the Statistics Canada General Social Survey began collecting data on social capital and trust.

“Community involvement and social contacts give rise to the standards, values and behaviours that benefit the whole of society,” Martin Turcotte explained in a 2015 Statistics Canada paper on social capital. “According to this view, one of the fundamental characteristics of communities with a high level of social capital is the tendency of citizens to trust one another — even if they do not know each other — which is referred to as ‘ generalized trust’.”

About 25,000 Canadians responded to the 2003 questionnaire, which included the question, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you cannot be too careful in dealing with other people?”

It did not take long for an anomaly to leap out as academics analyzed the response data. Abdie Kazemipur, a sociology professor at the University of Lethbridge, wrote in a 2006 paper that “trust levels are alarmingly low for cities in the province of Quebec.” In Montreal, just 38 per cent of respondents agreed that most people could be trusted, compared with 55 per cent in Toronto and roughly 65 per cent in Calgary and Vancouver. Overall, trust levels were far lower in Quebec than in any other province.

And the situation has not changed much since. The most recent survey in 2013 found that 36 per cent of Quebecers reported that most people could be trusted, well below the national average of 54 per cent.

As Potter noted, other s ocial- capital measures from the 2013 survey place Quebec at or near the bottom. Nationally, six per cent of people report having no close friends; in Quebec, the figure is eight per cent. On the other end of the friend spectrum, 75 per cent of Canadians report having 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 Long- pré wrote that societies like Quebec where the Catholic Church has exerted strong power “appear to have been imprinted by low levels of trust among its members.” She also said francophones “may more willingly place their trust in the state than in others.”

Dietlind Stolle, a professor of political science at McGill University, said francophone Quebecers’ overall minority status could partially explain the trust deficit. “Trust is usually lower in groups that have been discriminated against or abused historically speaking,” she said. “That is not surprising. For example, Afro- Americans in the U. S. are much less trusting than whites. Trust is 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 Barrington-Leigh, 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 social-capital 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 i nter- 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.

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