New immigrants less happy than longer-term Canadians, polls show

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A new poll from Angus Reid shows that a majority of Canadians still consider themselves happy, but that number has declined in recent years. Furthermore, non-white and new Canadians appear to be faring the worst in the growing trend of unhappiness.

The survey surveyed more than 1,600 adult Canadians last summer, resulting in a margin of error of plus or minus two percent, 19 times out of 20. The survey found that 61 percent of Canadians identified themselves as “very happy” or “fairly happy’. ” in their lives, with those over 55 leading the way at 68 percent.

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However, that still left more than a third of Canadians in the camps “not too happy” or “not at all happy,” and that group has grown in size compared to a similar poll nearly a decade ago.

In the “your outlook on life” category, 79 percent of Canadians in 2015 described themselves as satisfied or very satisfied, while only 21 percent called themselves dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. But in the new poll, the satisfied group dropped to 70 percent, while the dissatisfied accounted for the remaining 30 percent.

There also appears to be a link between a person’s time in Canada and their satisfaction level, and another link between happiness and ethnicity.

The survey found that people born in Canada were most likely to be very or somewhat happy (64 percent) versus not very happy or not at all happy (35 percent) compared to immigrants who have been here 20 years or less. That group was more likely to say they were unhappy (48 percent) than happy (45 percent), with 7 percent saying they were not sure.

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However, among immigrants who have lived in Canada for more than two decades, numbers rebounded. Canadians who have been immigrants for a long time tended to report being happy (60 percent) rather than unhappy (39 percent), a number more in line with those born in Canada.

There was also an ethnic division. Canadians who identified as white were more likely to be on the happy side of the spectrum (65 percent) than the unhappy side (33 percent), while those who said they were non-white were more evenly split, with 52 percent saying they they were. were happy and 45 percent unhappy.

Shachi Kurl, president of Angus Reid, said it’s not surprising that Canada’s new immigrant population is faring less well than the average Canadian.

“Uprooting yourself from your home country, trying to resettle yourself in a new country, not only financially and professionally, but also socially, it is not easy,” she said.

“I say this as the daughter of immigrants,” she added, noting that her own parents came here from India in the late 1960s.

But the numbers also suggest that happiness should increase as people spend more time in Canada and establish deeper roots. There’s also something called “opinion alignment,” she said, where views and emotions tend to align with those of the native population over time.

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Regarding the overall decline in happiness since the 2015 poll, Kurl cited a number of factors, including the ongoing cost-of-living crisis and “the aftermath of post-pandemic isolation impacts.”

“We haven’t quite figured that out yet,” she says. “Who knows how long it will last?”

There was a mix of good and bad news among the individual statistics. While a large majority of Canadians (85 percent) considered themselves satisfied with their relationships with their family and how others think of them, as well as with their place of residence (81 percent) and support systems (80 percent), those numbers fell quite a bit for other aspects of life.

For example, at the lower end of the scale, only 53 percent said they were satisfied with their personal financial situation, 56 percent with their stress levels and 69 percent with their health.

This may be why Angus Reid chose a Dickensian title to report his findings: “Great expectations or gloomy house?” It also noted that the numbers told ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.

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