Should I be concerned rhat Canada's happiness is slipping?

There's a World Happiness Report published every year - I've mentioned it from time to time in this blog: it seems like an interesting idea, a fun but functional concept.

This year, as always, Finland is top of the list, followed by all the other Scandinavian and near-Scandinavian countries (and, interestingly, Costa Rica). This year's Index has generated more attention that usual here in Canada, though, because Canada has fallen precipitously from 6th to 25th.

Scandal! Horrors!

Why Canada's happiness rating has fallen more than any other country is unclear. Social media, weakened family ties, a crumbling welfare state, and several other factors have all been mooted. But other countries are also living under the threat of  tariffs, dire climate change, even existential violation. Other countries use social media at least as much as we do. Why are Canadians more upset about everything than the denizens of other countries?

Actually, that's not the point of my entry.

What I found out this year is that the Global Happiness Index is actually based on a sample population's response to just a single "life evaluation" question. So, people are self-reporting how they feel at a particular point time, which doesn't sound very scientific somehow. Maybe the Canadians were sampled on the day Trump imposed tariffs on Canadian steel and car exports, or the day Trump reiterated his threat to make us the 51st US state? Maybe the Finns are the most delusional people, not actually the happiest? (Finland used to have the highest suicide rate in the world and, although it has improved that statistic impressively in recent years, its suicide rate is still worse than average. How happy can they really be?) And anyway, what happened to Bhutan, the self-styled "kingdom of happiness", with its famous Gross National Happiness metric? (It's not on the list at all!)

So, should I be concerned about the mental state of Canadians? Well, maybe, although perhaps 25th out of 147 is not all that bad. But surely we can do a better job of measuring happiness than a simplistic question.