Per capita, Greater Sudbury not only has the fastest growing population of seniors anywhere in Canada, they're among the happiest in the country.
According to a story in Yahoo Finance, data from Statistics Canada places the Nickel City as the fourth best place in Canada to retire, trailing only the Saguenay and Trois-Rivières in Quebec and St. John's in Newfoundland and Labrador.
“Sudbury has 330 lakes within the city limits, the most of any city in Canada,” says the story by journalist Emily Brandon. “A popular science museum, Science North, includes two snowflake-shaped buildings connected by a tunnel that contains evidence of an ancient meteorite impact and passes through a geological fault. The science centre sits atop glacially carved bedrock and overlooks Ramsey Lake.
“Greater Sudbury residents have an average life satisfaction score of 8.2 out of 10, and 72.7 per cent of residents list a score of at least 8. Only 11.3 per cent of residents rate their life satisfaction as 6 or lower.”
The story rates cities as the best places to retire based on overall happiness measures from a 2018 study entitled “How Happy are Your Neighbours?”
It was written by three Canadian researchers – John F. Helliwell and Hugh Shiplett of UBC, and Christopher P. Barrington-Leigh, a Montreal-based researcher for the U.S.-based National Bureau of Economic Research. They studied Statistics Canada and other data for more than 1,200 communities in Canada, taking advantage of a growing trend of governments in the West to collect data on citizen happiness.
The data is “anchored by a core question asking people how satisfied they currently are with their lives as a whole, on a scale running from 0 to 10,” the paper says.
The fact three of the top 10 happiest cities are in Quebec, the authors say, is “the consequence of a remarkable 25-year upward trajectory of life satisfaction in Quebec relative to the rest of the country.”
Surprisingly, the paper didn't find a connection between high income/low unemployment and happiness. But communities where people live closer to work, and have less commute times, are generally happier.
In fact, the researchers found that the unhappiest communities were in the biggest cities: Vancouver and Toronto came last.
“Life is significantly less happy in urban areas,” the researchers conclude. “We found life to indeed be less happy in the cities – by 0.18 points, almost half as large as the gap between the top and bottom quintiles. This was despite higher incomes, lower unemployment rates and higher education in the urban areas.”
One of the factors behind the results is the higher proportion of residents in big cities who have recently moved there, and so are still establishing roots and a sense of belonging to the area.
“The sense of community belonging, a well-established indicator of local social connectedness, has an urban-rural gap almost as big as that between the top and bottom life satisfaction,” the paper says.
Here's the full top 10 list of the best place to retire in Canada:
- Saguenay, Quebec
- Trois-Rivières, Quebec
- St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador
- Greater Sudbury, Ontario
- Quebec City
- Saint John, New Brunswick
- Sherbrooke, Quebec
- Thunder Bay, Ontario
- Moncton, New Brunswick
- Saskatoon, Saskatchewan