Happiness is way down in Canada – especially among youth – so how can HR help?

The World Happiness Report 2026 shows Canada has slipped to 25th place, continuing a decade‑long downward trend in how people rate their lives.

Driving that downward spiral is the under-25s; once the happiest group, they are now ranked among the least, with direct implications for how employers think about new hires and workplace wellbeing.

“By itself, a change in the ranking isn’t the end of the world,” says Chris Barrington‑Leigh, professor at McGill University in the Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy and the Bieler School of Environment.

“But then, if you look at the actual data, the actual averages of answers to the life satisfaction question across Canada, it is also in sharp decline.”

A generational shift behind Canada's lower ranking

The new World Happiness Report documents that under‑25s in English‑speaking countries now report lower life satisfaction than older adults due to several factors, including the timing of social media adoption, broader economic stress and shifting social conditions.

According to Barrington‑Leigh, behind the low national average sits a profound change in the age pattern of happiness. Historically, many countries showed a “U‑shape” across the life course, with higher life satisfaction in youth, a midlife dip, and a rebound later on.

“In Canada and U.S. and a number of other Western countries, that has changed radically,” he says. “The well being of youth has declined very dramatically in Canada. It’s really enormous.”

As a professor and parent, Barrington‑Leigh notes that he and others “are no longer able to tell youth a simple message of, ‘Here’s what you’re going to need to do to do well.’ There’s so much uncertainty about what the labour market is going to look like.”

The 2026 report also devotes an entire section to the relationship between social media and youth wellbeing, finding that heavy, especially passive, use is associated with lower life satisfaction, particularly among teenage girls in Western countries.

The social levers inside workplaces

When Barrington‑Leigh turns from population trends to organizations, he sees a consistent theme: the most effective levers that employers can pull to improve employee happiness are social – and they sit squarely in the HR and leadership domain.

“Along with all that bad news, there’s the good news that from decades of studying happiness, studying life satisfaction, and learning what it is that makes for a happy individual, happy society, happy community, happy workplace … we know a lot about how to make lives better,” he says.

“In other words, there’s space to improve lives, even if we don’t have immediate solutions to all of the global problems and the seemingly unstoppable technological changes.”

Citing workplace‑focused work by World Happiness Report editor Jan‑Emmanuel De Neve and economist George Ward using Indeed data, Barrington-Leigh explains that culture and relationships matter more than many managers assume.

“We’ve known for a long time that variables like trust in managers, trust in colleagues are enormously powerful in explaining both life satisfaction and work satisfaction,” he says.

“If you ask people what would make their work satisfaction better, they say things like flexibility and income, but if you look at the data of what actually explains differences in how life feels to people who are under different circumstances, then you get different answers…it’s the social context.”

Trust, belonging and management skills

Workplace wellbeing research also points to a clear business case for a focus on employee happiness. Barrington‑Leigh notes that the Indeed‑based studies found good news in how employees respond to trust in managers and employers: “worker retention, stock performance for public companies,” as well as an increase in talent attraction.

For Canadian HR leaders, this evidence can translate into concrete design goals for culture and leadership planning.

“What’s specific to workplaces is providing environments where people feel they’re being treated fairly,” Barrington-Leigh says. “And they trust and they believe that the people who have power over them, the managers, are acting in their interests, and where there’s a culture of trust amongst workers.”

This presents a challenge for manager training, he adds, observing that many managers aren’t trained in trust-building and cultural concepts like building social-emotional and non-cognitive skills.

“I think there’s probably an enormous opportunity for increasing the life satisfaction of everybody, if we could just get rid of bad management, in other words, make people follow good management practices,” he says.

“So that people don’t feel all the bad emotions that people feel when they are being treated unfairly.”