Racialized immigrants report lower well-being in Canada, study shows

A new Canadian citizen waves a Canada flag during a citizenship ceremony to mark Citizenship Week in Surrey, B.C., Monday, May 13, 2024. (Ethan Cairns/THE CANADIAN PRESS)

A new study suggests Canada’s high global ranking on life satisfaction masks important gaps, especially for racialized immigrants, who report significantly lower well-being than Canadian-born, non-racialized residents.

The research, conducted by the Population Health Research Institute, a joint institute of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences, draws on data from more than 8,000 adults and uses the Cantril Ladder, a global scale where people rate their life from 0 (worst possible) to 10 (best possible).

“The higher you check off, the higher you are on the ladder (and) the greater your life satisfaction.” said Sonia Anand, principal investigator and senior scientist at PHRI, in an interview with CTVNews.ca. “The average life expectancy amongst our cross-sectional sample in Canada was 7.1, which means that on average, Canadians have a high life satisfaction.”

Overall, 71 per cent of participants were thriving. But racialized immigrants reported a significantly lower probability of thriving (57 per cent) compared with Canadian-born non-racialized participants (73 per cent).

Anand said the research team then “dug a bit deeper” to see whether some groups had consistently lower scores.

“That is where we noted that people who were immigrants to Canada, and in particular, people who were racialized immigrants, had lower life satisfaction scores,” she said.

Why racialized immigrants report lower satisfaction

Racialized immigrants in the study reported lower life satisfaction partly due to discrimination based on skin colour, according to the authors.

“If you’re a new Canadian and you’re a person of colour, and it’s difficult to settle in the country … then you’re going to have a harder time and likely will score lower life satisfaction,” she said.

Anand said the findings point to clear areas where policy change could improve well-being.

“We look to see what are the modifiable factors that, if we changed in Canada, may improve life satisfaction,” she said. “Health care and health-care access came out very strongly.”

She pointed to increasing the number of family doctors, moving toward universal pharmacare, improving income supports and strengthening settlement services for newcomers.

“What can we do in Canada is to have a plan around immigration when we welcome newcomers, set them up with settlement services, and try and make that transition easier,” she said.

What shapes well-being in Canada

The study identified several factors linked to higher life satisfaction, including older age, male sex, having trusted neighbours and having a language-concordant family doctor.

“Having a family doctor with whom you speak the same language was associated with a higher level of life satisfaction, as was advancing age,” she said.

On age specifically, the study found that it’s mostly tied to financial stability.

“It’s often correlated with having settled down, having a place to live, and also perhaps being in retirement age,” Anand said.

Lower life satisfaction was tied to factors like social disadvantage, being female, poorer cardiovascular health, inability to afford prescription medications, seeking care in an emergency department and being racialized.

“I don’t think it should be surprising that women still report lower life satisfaction,” Anand said. “That can be due to issues at home, where perhaps they’re working and also responsible for managing all the care in the home, as well as issues at work, which could be everything from earning lower wages to not having authority, or moving up professionally.”

She also noted that being female is an independent factor associated with lower life satisfaction in Canada, and the effect is cumulative when combined with other disadvantages.

“If you happen to be a woman who’s an immigrant, a person of colour, who maybe doesn’t have a family doctor who speaks the same language as you, and who maybe has to go to the emergency room for care, and who maybe has to pay for medications out of her own wages, then, all of a sudden you can see those cumulative factors add up to a much lower life satisfaction compared to people who do not have those challenges,” Anand explained.