Our changing home lives: Goodbye dinner parties, hello video games!

Home life, Fifties-style (click for source)

We’re spending less time reading and socializing, and more time browsing the Internet and playing video games. So suggests a Statistics Canada study examining how Canadians use their time, quietly released last summer.

Adjusted for population growth, Canadians spent about four times as much time using their computers for recreational purposes in 2010 as they did in 1998. Though the gradual disappearance of the computerless household can be credited for part of this, so can a sharp rise (from 5% in 1998 to 24% in 2010) in the percentage of Canadians who spent at least part of the day puttering around on the computer.

Video games in particular enjoyed a meteoric rise over those 12 years, with the amount of time Canadians spent playing games — again adjusted for population growth — tripling between 1998 and 2010.

The biggest losers in this time-shift: reading and socializing at home.

Between 1998 and 2010, Canadians hacked 23 percent off their reading-time budgets and 15 percent off their socializing-at-home time.

Participation rates also tumbled, with the percentage of Canadians who spent part of their day reading books, newspapers and magazines dropping from one-third to one-quarter, and the percentage who spent time at home socializing with family and friends during the typical day dropping from 55 percent to 48 percent.

Television viewing took a smaller hit, the amount of time spent channel-surfing dropping by five percent between 1998 and 2010.

The effect can be seen in the nation’s bookstores and newspapers, both of which had a miserable first decade of the 21st century as demand for their products waned.

More time spent online is also poised to put more strain on Canada’s health care system in the future, with more time spent online being associated with higher levels of obesity and less Vitamin D intake, which in itself puts people “at risk for diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and a lot of cancers”.

There were some bright spots, however.  Housekeeping, cooking and washing up took up less of Canadians’ time in 2010 than they did in 1998. We also got a little more sleep (13 minutes, or 3%, more per night in 2010 than we did in 1998).

The news was a little more mixed on the work front, with the average Canadian employee’s working hours being four minutes shorter in 2010 than in 1998, but the unpaid part of the workday — such as commuting — taking an extra eight minutes out of the day.

The Best Countries to Have Lived In During 2011

If your New Years resolution is to lose weight or quit smoking, consider yourself fortunate. At least it’s not “find a better country to live in”.

Moving to another country is a resolution that likely crossed many minds in 2011.

While 2011 was a fairly positive year here in Winnipeg, the best thing many of the world’s seven billion people can say about 2011 is that it’s almost over.

It was a year that brought several calamities: revolution in the Arab world, natural disasters in Japan and New Zealand and economic and political turmoil in Europe.

It ended with Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s deranged despot (and supposed golf pro), dropping dead and turning the fate of 24 million North Koreans, and every soldier in every army with a stake in East Asian peace, over to an inexperienced 27-year-old.

Though it’s unlikely that anyone in North Korea ever sees this blog, there has been a steady stream of visitors landing on this blog  by doing keyword searches for “best countries to live in” and “world’s best government”. This brings visitors to “The World’s Best Countries” (Nov. 17, 2009)  and “The World’s Best Governments” (Jan. 8, 2011).

Since there seems to be the demand out there for this information, I’ve decided to do a follow-up to the 2009 post, putting together a list of the world’s 20 best countries to have been living in in 2011 based on their rankings in four indexes:

• The United Nations’ Human Development Index, focusing on the basic elements of the good life, such as health and literacy.

• The Swiss-based International Institute for Management Development’s World Competitiveness Yearbook, focusing on economic fundamentals.

• Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, focusing on honest, open government.

• Vision of Humanity’s Global Peace Index, focusing on citizens’ physical safety.

The idea here is that the better a country ranks across all four indexes, the closer it is likely to have come to securing the best possible life for its citizens. Taken together, the lessons learned from these countries could be the basis of an instruction manual, How to Run a Country and Do a Good Job of It.

Perhaps these rankings will even help someone who resolves to get out from under their abusive or inept government find the country that’s right for them in 2012.

(Click to view in a new window)

Fixing “Under-Educated Manitoba” could help ensure that Jets, Ikea are here to stay

“Stand with me on the top of the Union Bank building, Winnipeg’s new skyscraper, and take a look at the city. You had best pull your fur cap down over your ears and button your coon-skin coat tightly about you, for the wind is blowing a gale,” a writer named Frank G. Carpenter wrote in the Newark Sunday Call on Jan. 7, 1906.

“The air is nipping, but the sky is bright, and there is so much ozone that we seem to be breathing champagne. Have you ever felt so alive before?”

“Take a look over the city,” he continued. “It stretches out on all sides for miles. The new shingle roofs shine brightly under the Winter sun, and we can almost smell the paint of the suburban additions. Winnipeg is a grower.”

By 1992, the Union Bank Building’s condition seemed to symbolize Winnipeg’s deteriorating outlook. By the time the last tenant moved out of the increasingly decrepit building at the corner of William and Main that year, Calgary had long since displaced Winnipeg as the corporate capital of the prairie provinces, a necessary consequence of energy replacing agriculture, and services replacing manufacturing, as the west’s key job and wealth generators.

Buildings once occupied by regional and national head offices stood largely vacant. The provincial unemployment rate was 9.3 percent. The Jets were threatening to leave town, and would indeed do so four years later. The fading glory of the Eaton’s store on Portage Ave. portended the bankruptcy that followed just a few years later. Even the summer was a stinker, bringing one of the chilliest Julys in living memory, with 13 days of daytime highs of less than 20°C (68°F) — and the month’s warmest day only heating up to 26°C (79°F).

Nearly 20 years later, the city’s outlook is considerably brighter. The year 2011 brought the return of the Jets, construction continued at the strongest pace in decades, and the weather has been unbelievably good. The now-defunct Eaton’s chain will never return, of course, but the imminent arrival of Target and Ikea have many retail junkies excited. The main problem facing the local labour market is not unemployment, but skill shortages.

And, I originally forgot to mention, the Union Bank Building is coming back to life, with Red River College planning to move in.

Though it might feel as if the champagne days have returned, this is not a time to coast along, but rather to prepare as best we can for an unpredictable future.

Statistics Canada’s 2008 economic figures for each province should have sounded an alert that Manitoba’s current prosperity is perhaps a little too dependent on cheap borrowing (thanks, Bank of Canada, for the low interest rates!) and a tight labour market (thanks, Boomers, for retiring!) as opposed to solid long-term fundamentals.

In 2008, Manitoba ranked 10th among the 13 provinces and territories in workforce productivity — that is, the average economic value generated by every work-hour. This is an important measure of a province’s overall economic health, future prospects, and skill at getting the best out of its people.

This seems counter-intuitive, given that Manitobans are not particularly work-shy. In 2008, a larger share of Manitoba’s population was in the workforce than was the case in any part of Canada outside of Alberta and the northern territories. The British, whose press have complained for years about the country’s “long-hours culture”, devoted on average 50 fewer hours to their jobs in 2008 than Manitobans did, while the average American only spent about 20 minutes per day longer on the job.

So relax and enjoy your lunch hour away from your desk, and don’t go in to the office on Saturday if you don’t need to:  it’s not a lack of a work ethic that calls the sustainability of today’s economic optimism into question.

Rather, it’s in Manitoba’s traditionally weak education ethic that you’ll find the problem.

We have one of Canada’s lowest post-secondary attainment rates, which sends the message to businesses across Canada and around the world that “Manitoba” is not synonymous with “quality”, at least as far as the labour force is concerned.

In the 2006 census, we ranked 10th among the 13 provinces and territories in terms of the percentage of 25 to 64 year olds with post-secondary credentials in any form, whether it be a college diploma, university degree or a trades designation.

Only Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Nunavut ranked worse.

If Manitoba had achieved Nova Scotia’s fifth-place ranking — 61% of Nova Scotians aged 25-64 had post-secondary credentials, compared to 54% of Manitobans — prospective investors would have had 37,500 more skilled Manitobans to choose from.

And 37,500 Manitobans would have had a brighter future.

As a community becomes better-educated, the community starts to take on a more winsome image: job growth in the sciences takes off, the city’s arts and cultural community gets larger, more people start living downtown, and public transit use goes up (take note, urbanists).

An October 2011 Statistics Canada study even found evidence that an education ethic improves public health: 25-year old women with university degrees could expect to live four years longer than their friends who never finished high school, while 25-year old men with university degrees could expect a six-year advantage.

But it’s creating more jobs in the sciences, in particular, which could help Manitoba boom — and ensure that the Jets, Ikea and today’s young people will be here to stay.

A strong supply of people with scientific training is what separates the dynamic economies from the rest. It’s why, if you were asked to name Canada’s most successful or appealing cities, you’d likely name the ones with the largest number of science-related jobs as a proportion of the workforce: Ottawa, Calgary, Quebec City, Toronto and Victoria.

Percentage of local workforce in natural/applied sciences occupations (2006 census)

Science-related jobs can deliver big returns. Among OECD countries — excluding a couple of outliers — every dollar spent on research and development in 2006 was linked to an average of $17 in additional economic activity.

If you could spend $1 and get $17 in benefits from it, would you? Of course you would.

Research and development could be to Manitoba what oil is to Alberta and Newfoundland-Labrador, and what potash is to Saskatchewan.

But it requires easy access to people with professional training in mathematics, computers and information technology, the physical and life sciences, the social and behavioural sciences, and in management and administration.

That’s an area where Manitoba has long fallen short. We’ve traditionally been better at producing high school dropouts than scientists.

That has been changing gradually. Over the past 20 years, recent governments have recognized that the unusually large numbers of Manitobans with low levels of education are holding the province back. They buy less from local businesses, they pay less tax, and they are more likely to become dependent on social services.

Bringing an education ethic back to Manitoba needs to be Job #1 for the next few provincial governments.

This can be done in a couple of ways. One is by continuing the Healthy Child and Career Trek programs aimed at building ambition in young children. Another is by lobbying the federal government to continue allowing Manitoba to take in large numbers of immigrants. As immigrants are more likely to send their children on to post-secondary education than non-immigrants, the current immigration policies bring an excellent hope of achieving cultural change through demographic change.

We need to put as much passion into ensuring that 95 percent of Manitobans born in 2015 will graduate from high school on-time in 2033 — and that 75 percent will have completed some form of post-secondary education by their 25th birthdays in 2040 — as we did into bringing the Jets, Ikea and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to town.

And we need to embrace the idea that successful cities and provinces are not necessarily defined by the stuff they have, but by how well or how poorly their people are educated.

Because if we don’t have big-city brains, it will be tougher for us to hold on to our big-city toys.

And if we reach these ambitious goals, perhaps someday a foreign correspondent will once again stand atop a Winnipeg skyscraper in the cold winter wind, marvel at how fast the city is growing and how prosperous it looks, and once again proclaim that “Winnipeg is a grower.”

Immigrants bring culture change for the better

To say that immigration is important to Manitoba’s population growth is almost an understatement. Of the 21,170 people who moved into Manitoba during the 12 months leading up to the 2006 Census, 46 percent were from abroad — giving us the fourth-highest dependence on immigration as a source of newcomers after Ontario (70%), Quebec (68%) and B.C. (52%).

While it might not be a hot destination in the minds of other Canadians, with Manitoba ranking only 11th out of 13 provinces and territories in the 2006 Census in terms of incoming domestic migrants per capita, for many international newcomers a move to Manitoba can be the first step to a better life.

For immigrants from Colombia and Mexico, it means an escape from the violence that plagues those countries, in comparison to which life in the North End might seem like a walk in the park. Even for immigrants from more prosperous England, where the average price of a flat (i.e., condo) in Greater London was a stunning £351,655 ($558,400 Cdn.) in mid-2010, a move to Manitoba could mean the opportunity to own a spacious home with a yard — a £827,477 ($1.3 million Cdn.) luxury beyond the reach of the London middle class.

The drive to attract immigrants to Manitoba might appear on the surface to be part of an effort to ease the effect of upcoming “baby boomer” retirements that, if left unchecked, could play havoc with the province’s finances by simultaneously slashing income tax revenues at a time when health and social service costs are rising.

But a desirable side effect could be to change the province’s culture for the better.

Manitoba has long struggled with the lack of an “education culture”. In the 2006 Census, only 56 percent of Manitoba’s 25-34 year olds had any form of post-secondary education, ranking us 12th out of the 13 provinces and territories, with only Nunavut having fewer well-educated young people per capita.

In terms of high school dropouts, Manitoba’s 16 percent of 25-34 year olds without a high school diploma ranked us #3 after the Northwest Territories (22%) and Nunavut (46%).

Needless to say, the economic effects were not good. Even though 2003 statistics showed that Ontarians on average worked just 1.6 percent more hours per job than Manitobans, and even Albertans only worked 5.3 percent more hours than their Manitoba counterparts, output per hour worked in Manitoba was the third-lowest in the country, ahead of New Brunswick and P.E.I.

Likewise, per capita spending on research and development — a strong driver of economic growth, but reliant on a well-educated population — had us in 8th place among the 10 provinces in 2008, again just ahead of P.E.I. and New Brunswick.

Manitoba’s ambitions — I hope we have those ambitions — to play a more meaningful role in the Canadian economy than merely as an exporter of talent to Alberta, Ontario and B.C. requires us to develop a culture of education.

A continuing influx of immigrants is one of our best hopes of that.

A 2008 Statistics Canada analysis based on their Ethnic Diversity Study found that the 25-to-34 year old children of immigrant parents were significantly more likely to have completed university than the children of Canadian-born parents — 38 percent among the former group, 28 percent among the latter.

Immigrant groups that brought a strong culture of education to our shores included those from China (70% of whose children went on to become university graduates), India (65%), Africa (56%), “other” Asian countries (52%), “other” European countries (45%) and the U.K. (38%).

If there’s one thing Manitoba needs, it is a larger number of parents committed to steering their children toward whichever form of post-secondary education makes best use of their talents.

While it should in no way let Manitoba-born parents off the hook, continuing to welcome large numbers of immigrants to Manitoba — as many as we can reasonably handle — will be necessary to accomplish the culture change we need to not just survive, but thrive.

The World’s Best Governments

Politics might be little more than background noise to most Canadians, but you might be surprised to learn that Canada is one of the world’s 10 best-governed jurisdictions. So suggest numbers published online by the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators Project.

Since 1996, the Worldwide Governance Indicators Project, headed by Daniel Kaufmann of the Brookings Institution, Aart Kraay of the World Bank Development Economics Research Group and Massimo Mastruzzi of World Bank Institute, have been tracking the performance of the world’s countries and autonomous regions in six areas of performance: giving citizens a voice in how the place is run and in being accountable to them, political stability, overall government effectiveness, quality of regulation, rule of law and control of corruption.

In each of these six areas, the Project assigns each country or autonomous region a score of up to 100. As the following table of the world’s 25 best-governed nations shows, Canada ranked 10th overall as of the Project’s latest update on the state of the world’s governments, released in 2009. Nordic countries — Finland, Denmark and Sweden — dominated the top three spots while the rest of the top 10 spots were dominated by other smaller northern European countries, aside from New Zealand in fifth place.

World's 25 best governments, 2009 (Click to enlarge)

For simplicity, numerical scores have been converted into letter grades as follows:

• A+ (97-100)
• A (93-96)
• A- (90-92)
• B+ (87-89)
• B (83-86)
• B- (80-82)
• C+ (77-79)
• C (73-76)
• C- (70-72)
• D+ (67-69)
• D (63-66)
• D- (60-62)
• F (below 60)

Canada’s only significant shortcoming was in government stability, though even here we finished with a respectable 85 out of 100, still good enough for a ‘B’ grade.

Britain — on whose model of government Canada’s is based — also faced shortcomings on political stability, scoring only 55 out of 100, earning it an ‘F’ in this regard and preventing it from enjoying a higher rank given its excellent scores in other areas.

The United States was also held back by a poor score on political stability (59 out of 100, which earned it an ‘F’), causing it to fall just short of the Top 25 with a 28th place finish despite earning more respectable Bs in most other aspects of government and one A-minus on rule of law.

The worst-governed countries included Somalia, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Congo and Zimbabwe, all of which earned average scores of less than 5 out of 100.

Of the 213 jurisdictions measured, only the top eight percent — home to a mere three percent of the world’s population — merited an overall grade of A- or better. Sixty-two percent of jurisdictions earned a failing grade overall, and 43 percent of places failed in all six areas measured.

Lesson learned: If you’re lucky enough to live in Canada, you’ve got it pretty good. But if you ever want advice on how to run a really good government, call Finland.

Charting a new course for Winnipeg

A new effort to brighten Winnipeg’s future gets under way in January. That’s when a new private-sector led initiative called “Yes! Winnipeg” will get up and running, mandated to pursue economic growth and a new spirit of prosperity for our city.

It’s the latest in a series of efforts over the years to revive the fortunes of a city which went through a period of stress and struggle that lasted a generation. Winnipeg had begun the ’70s as the country’s fifth-largest metropolitan area and the economic capital of the Canadian Prairies, with a population one-tenth larger than Edmonton’s and one-third larger than Calgary’s.

By 2001, Winnipeg was the country’s eighth-largest metro area and had been deposed as a regional economic capital by both Calgary and Edmonton, which by that point were both 40 percent larger than Winnipeg in terms of population.

The decline appears to have stopped. Statistics Canada projects that Winnipeg will still be #8 in 2031, with a metro population of about 884,000.

Winnipeg will obviously be a somewhat bigger city in 2031 than it is today, but will still be a secondary market a mere one-tenth the size of metro Toronto (8.9 million), and much smaller than Montreal (4.9 million), Vancouver (3.5 million), Calgary (1.9 million), Ottawa-Gatineau (1.6 million) or Edmonton (1.5 million).

The days of grandeur — the days when Winnipeg was one of Canada’s most important cities — are obviously not coming back. But there are still things that can be done to become a more pleasant place to live in the decades ahead.

I copied and organized some of the data that Statistics Canada keeps on its 2006 Community Profiles web site and set out to look for the factors that make some cities more vibrant than others — younger, better educated and more attractive to people moving back and forth within Canada.

From the sample of 25 cities I looked at, here’s what I learned:

1. Keeping a healthy balance of young and old is crucial. If you follow the news, you probably have heard about politicians being concerned about an aging population. These concerns are well founded, and not just because of the impact of soaring health care costs that we keep hearing about. In the 2006 census, cities with older populations tended to be worse off in several ways:

• Older cities tend to have lower household incomes, and working people make up a smaller percentage of the overall population. (Keep in mind that working people pay more tax and drive consumer spending, so an aging population is detrimental for both government and business.)

 

• Older cities tend to have weaker housing markets — rents are lower, monthly home owner expenditures are lower, and turnover is lower. Low turnover also contributes to some degree to a larger number of homes requiring major repairs.

 

• Older cities tend to place heavier financial demands on federal and provincial governments due to larger numbers of people relying on redistributed income to survive. Thus, cities that allow their populations to age will find it much more difficult in the coming decades to satisfy a public that wants quality services and fiscal responsibility and no tax increases, all at the same time.

 

Fortunately, Winnipeg is doing not too badly in this regard. In 2006, the median age of Winnipeg’s 694,665 residents (38.8 years) was slightly lower than the national median age of 39.5 years. Keeping that median age down, however, will require us to:

• Continue welcoming large numbers of immigrants to our community (a good thing if you think diversity is kind of cool, as I do), given the reluctance of other Canadians to move here and the dubious record of various “baby bonus” schemes tried around the world.

 

• Create rewarding jobs to encourage locally raised young people to stay here — jobs in business services and the sciences that are both interesting and lucrative.

 

• Create fun, interesting lifestyle options to keep people here

2. Education needs to remain a priority. For years, Manitoba has had a problem with its troubling high school dropout rate, which intensified the gap between rich and poor in Winnipeg as promising job opportunities for those with less than a Grade 12 education became fewer and further between. It also took a toll in other ways. For governments, high school dropouts pay less tax and put more strain on health care and social services budgets. For businesses, high school dropouts mean fewer discretionary spending dollars to go around, and it makes Winnipeg a less attractive place to invest or to hire. And it’s demoralizing for everyone.

Increasing the number of post-secondary graduates is also important for creating the kinds of business and science-related jobs that give a city a sense of vibrancy. Across the 25 cities examined, a higher percentage of the population with a university degree, for example, tends to mean that:

• Reliance on social assistance and other government transfers goes down, which frees up government funds for other priorities.

 

• Use of public transit systems goes up, reducing reliance on subsidies.

 

• Jobs in management, the sciences, and in arts, culture, recreation and sport become more plentiful.

 

• Demand for housing increases. (A one-point increase in the percentage of people aged 15 years and over with a university degree is associated with an increase of more than $15,000 in average home values.)

The key to fixing this problem will be to start children on the path from an early age to completing high school and then going on to post-secondary education. This will be a challenge in the inner city where many families have no history of post-secondary education and where young people have less exposure to the working world and to the career options available to them than do their suburban counterparts.

3. Becoming a less manufacturing-focused town will be an important part of making Winnipeg a more attractive place to live. To get a better sense of what divides the cities that young people dream of living in someday from those they don’t dream of living in (or desperately want to get out of), I looked for factors across the 25 cities examined that had some relation to the percentage of citizens who lived in another province or territory five years earlier.

Unfortunately, one of the most important factors was geography — the one factor that Winnipeg can do absolutely nothing about. Using a scale of 0 to 100, where both St. John’s, Newfoundland and Victoria, B.C. at the far ends of the country represented a “100″ and the half-way point in between at approximately 88°W longitude represented a “0″, I noticed that the closer a city was to the middle of the country, the smaller the concentration of expats and returnees from other parts of Canada.

This, at least, is consistent with what we already know about those who move away to pursue jobs in the energy industry or to live in a less extreme mountain or coastal climate. It’s also consistent with the problems that the U.S. Midwest has had in terms of preventing its young and well educated from being drawn away from the interior of the continent toward the peripheries.

The other factor that makes a big difference here is how much a city’s economy relies on manufacturing. Manufacturing towns tend to be the worst at drawing in returnees and people looking for a better way of life.

Rightly or wrongly, manufacturing is seen as offering little in the way of secure, well-paying or mentally stimulating jobs — and that drives people away. A little more than 45 percent of the difference between cities in terms of the size of the expat and returnee community can be attributed to how much of the workforce is engaged in manufacturing, making this just as important as a city’s geographical location.

• Among the 25 cities examined, 12 cities had more than 10 percent of their workforce in manufacturing, including Winnipeg at 11 percent. The average size of the expat and returnee community in these 12 cities: 1.3 percent of the population.

 

• Among the 13 cities where less than 10 percent of the workforce was involved in manufacturing, the expat and returnee community constituted, on average, 4.5 percent of the population.

This is not to suggest that it would be healthy to have the same fate befall Winnipeg as befell other Midwestern cities that became ghost towns as manufacturers disappeared. A better way to reduce our reliance on manufacturing is to change the local labour force by setting people on the right course toward higher education while they’re still young. As long as we are the high school dropout capital of Canada — or even a serious contender for that dubious honour — our ability to shift our economy away from manufacturing and toward jobs in the business services and science sectors will be severely compromised.

Though Winnipeg will likely never regain the status it enjoyed as recently as the early ’70s as the economic capital of the Canadian Prairies, I’ve sought to outline some of the changes that could be made to at least allow us Winnipeggers to have a better way of life and to start to turn our city’s reputation around.

It’s shorter on specifics than I would have liked — there’s only so much one blogger can do — but if it shifts the terms of reference away from the idea that all that Winnipeg needs to get out of neutral is a new stadium, an NHL team, an Ikea store or some other bauble instead of deeper structural changes, it will have been worth it.

Weekend Update: The latest research on love, orgasms and the benefits of meat

Does this image calm you? Read on...

It’s been ages since the previous Weekend Update, taking in some of the interesting insights into science and the human condition being uncovered by researchers around the world. Here’s the latest on what’s been happening:

 

• High on love? You’ve probably heard people compare the experience of being in love to being high on drugs. There might be more truth to that comparison than you thought, thanks to the work being done by researchers at Syracuse University in New York State. According to research published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, falling in love takes just one-fifth of a second, and involves the stimulation of a dozen different parts of the brain, leading to increased levels of dopamine, adrenaline, oxytocin and vasopressin. The results: a euphoric feeling similar to the effects of cocaine.

 

• Liar, liar… A recent 130-page article in the Journal of Sexual Medicine based on interviews with 5,865 Americans aged 14 to 94 years delved deep into the sex lives of our southern neighbours. One of the most noteworthy findings: when they asked men if their latest sex partner experienced an orgasm, 85 percent said “yes”. Yet when women were asked if they had an orgasm the last time they had sex, only 64 percent said “yes”.

 

• The Peace of Meat. For a lot of Canadians, there’s nothing like a nice, juicy steak done on the barbecue. Now, if the thought of a steak on the barbecue makes you feel more relaxed, there might be a good reason for that. Researchers at McGill University in Montreal showed 82 men a series of images and assessed whether each image made research participants more or less aggressive or had no effect. To their surprise, they actually found that images of meat actually had a calming influence.

 

• Stay focused, be happy. A new article in the journal Science raised a few eyebrows recently when it reported that human beings spend a surprising amount of time daydreaming. According to Harvard University psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, the average human being spends about 47 percent of his or her time daydreaming — and the more people allowed their minds to wander, the less happy they tended to be. Using a mobile app that allowed researchers to find out what participants were doing and thinking at any one time, and how happy they were when they were doing it, they found that people were both most focused and happiest when making love. Exercise and conversation also tended to boost happiness, while resting, working or using a computer tended to be less happy times.

 

• Branding ourselves. You might have noticed that some people prominently wear clothing or jewellery that readily identifies them by their religious persuasion, while others always wear clothing or carry gadgets with conspicuous brand logos. Are the two practices linked? They might very well be, according to a new study from Duke University. In two completely separate experiments, researchers found that people with stronger religious orientations tended to be less interested in product branding, while the opposite was true for less religious people. Whether it be that piece of religious jewellery or that brand logo on our clothes, it’s all about “belonging” according to Prof. Gavan Fitzsimons: “We’re signalling to others that we care about ourselves and that we feel good about ourselves and that we matter in this world.”

 

• Got a kid with ADHD? Try turning up the white noise. A researcher at a Swedish university might have come up with a way of dealing with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that avoids both the costs and the side effects of prescription medication. Stockholm University’s Dr. Goran Soderlund studied 51 students in neighbouring Norway. He found that students who normally have difficulty paying attention performed better on a memorization test when there was white noise in the background than in a quieter room — but that the white noise had the opposite effect on students without ADHD. The probable reason: Students with ADHD usually lack adequate levels of dopamine in the brain, causing it to operate at a suboptimal level — and the child to become hyperactive to compensate for that.

 

The world isn’t watching, and that’s just fine

Who is this man? Only the leader of one of the world's most successful countries...*

“Harper enhances Canada’s leadership role in the world”, a headline in Friday’s Ottawa Citizen said.

“Grits want Harper to push Canada’s place on world stage”, was the headline of an article Meagan Fitzpatrick wrote in Tuesday’s Vancouver Sun.

But does the rest of the world see Canada as having a leadership role in the world? Do we have a starring role on the world stage?

And even if the answer to both questions is “no”, is that necessarily a bad thing?

A review of a few major foreign newspapers suggests that Canada is just one of many supporting actors on the world stage.

For example, the Sydney Morning Herald published only two stories specifically about Canada in the past week. One, in its Saturday, Sept. 25 edition, was titled “Canada delays athletes heading to Delhi”.  This comes three days after “Hurricane Igor hits Canada”.

The paper’s only other coverage of Canadian events this month: four stories about Hurricane Earl, two stories about drug arrests, one story titled “Canada court frees four detained Tamils”, and one about Canadian assistance to Pakistan. So, from an Australian point of view, Canada is a country that merits attention once every few days.

How about the New York Times? Given the closer proximity to Canada and the volume of Canada-U.S. trade, surely they must have more coverage of Canadian affairs?

Hardly. The Times’ Canada page only lists four stories so far this month: one about G-8/G-20 summit expenses, one about cycling, one about Bell Canada’s takeover of CTV, and a passing mention of Canada in relation to the Commonwealth Games. That’s it.

So what about the Financial Times, the prestigious newspaper read by the who’s who of London’s business world?

Again, just four mentions so far this month: one about the gun registry vote, one about Canada’s nuclear power business being in limbo, one about rising interest rates, and one about BHP Billiton’s possible takeover of Saskatchewan’s Potash Corporation.

The Economist‘s “Americas” page? Nada. Zilch. Nothing at all about Canada there this week.

Now, before you start to feel bad about the world paying so little attention to Canada, think about this: journalists love bad news. That’s why The Economist passed over boring old Canada in favour of murder and mayhem in Colombia, political turmoil in Venezuela, and a mayoral candidate in Lima, the capital of Peru, who promises to be honest (unlike, say, one of the country’s former presidents, who is now serving a 25-year prison sentence for murder, bodily harm, kidnapping, embezzlement, etc.)

Indeed, being a prominent country doesn’t guarantee a high quality of life.

A worldwide public opinion study carried out between 2004 and 2007 asked people to rate how satisfied they were with their lives on a scale of “1″ to “10″. Based on a rating of “8″ or higher, the list of the countries with the most contented citizens was a Who’s Who of countries that play only a supporting role at best on the world stage: Switzerland (74%), Norway (74%), Finland (73%), Canada (66%), New Zealand (66%) and Sweden (66%).

Countries with a bigger role of the world stage didn’t fare as well. Sixty percent of Britons were solidly satisfied with their lives, which looked pretty good compared to the findings from the United States (53%), Germany (51%), Spain (48%), Japan (46%), France (44%) or Italy (36%).

These findings date back before the 2008 financial crisis, from which Canada has emerged less scathed, so far.

Imagine how much wider the gap between Canada and the U.K., the U.S. and Spain must be now.

Less noteworthy countries also dominated the U.N.’s latest Human Development Index.

The top performer here was Norway, a country whose prime minister — a fellow by the name of Jens Stoltenberg — is so unknown after five years in office that he could probably walk from one end of Polo Park to the other on the last shopping day before Christmas  without being recognized.

The other countries in the Top Five: Australia (then led by the only modestly well-known Kevin Rudd), Iceland (led for most of 2009 by the obscure Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir), Canada, and Ireland (led by Brian Cowen, yet another not so well known figure on the world stage).

There are many factors that make some countries more desirable places to live than others, but having a prominent role on the world stage doesn’t seem to be one of them.

In fact, being a smaller, less noticeable country might be more of a blessing. Smaller countries are less likely to surround their leaders with air-tight security (it wasn’t until the 2008 financial crisis that Iceland’s prime minister even began traveling with a professional bodyguard), and can use the resources that they don’t have tied up in various global responsibilities to deal with domestic quality of life issues.

If Stephen Harper or Michael Ignatieff hope for the day when the international press will give them daily coverage, that is their prerogative. The quality of life for the rest of us, however, might be better served by Canadian governments focusing on practical things they can do at home to improve our quality of life than by getting caught up in visions of grandeur on the world stage.

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* – In case you haven’t guessed it by now, the man shown above is Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg

Looking for a less stressful life? Head for the coasts, not Quebec

No, they're not dancing...

Ever wonder which city in Canada can boast the least-stressed-out citizens? Or wonder which city’s residents are the heaviest drinkers?

So did Statistics Canada.

Long before it became embroiled in this summer’s Long-Form Census ruckus, StatsCan went in search of which Canadian cities had the healthiest lifestyles.

Though it’s been a full six years since the report was first published, it contained some interesting details about differences from one city to another that many Canadians might not have heard about.

Looking for a less stressful lifestyle? Consider moving to the country’s coasts. StatsCan found that St. John’s, N.L. was the least-stressed city in Canada, with only 16 percent of residents saying that they had a lot of stress in their lives, ten percentage points below the nation-wide average of 26 percent. The next least-stressed cities: Halifax (20%) and Vancouver (21%).

St. John's, N.L.: Canada's least stressed-out city (© KarenNfld; from Panoramio)

The place not to move to if you’re looking for less stress: the province of Quebec. For all the cultural richness and beauty of the province’s two main cities, Quebec City residents expressed the most widespread complaints of stress eating away at their lives (33%), followed by Montreal residents (29%). Winnipeg finished more or less in the middle, at 24 percent, ranking 11th out of 25 for reports of high levels of stress in day-to-day life.

However stressful life might be in Quebec, you have to go across the border to Ontario to find Canada’s booze-and-cigs capital: Sudbury, Ontario. The northern mining town made infamous many years ago by Stompin’ Tom Connors’s unflattering song Sudbury Saturday Night — “The girls are out to Bingo and the boys are gettin’ stinko” — topped the scales for both the prevalence of smokers (31%) and self-reported heavy drinkers (23%). No surprise, then, that Sudburians had an average life expectancy almost four and a half years less than Vancouverites (76.7 versus 81.1 years, respectively).

Sudbury, Ont.: #1 for booze and smokes (© Andre Guitard; from Panoramio)

Torontonians, Victorians and Vancouverites were the least likely to be in the smoking habit — fewer than 20 percent of residents in each city identified themselves as smokers. Winnipeg, surprisingly, only ranked 19th out of 25 for the prevalence of smokers. Winnipeg ranked 11th, however, for heavy drinking — a problem that was significantly higher than the national average in Sudbury, St. John’s and Thunder Bay, and lower than the national average in Vancouver and Toronto.

An interesting east-west divide was apparent on the issue of physical inactivity. StatsCan found that Sherbrooke, Quebec was the most physically inactive city in Canada, and that Chicoutimi, Kitchener, St. John’s, Montreal and Toronto all showed rates of physical inactivity which were significantly higher than the national average. The cities that were significantly less prone to inactivity: Calgary, Edmonton, Thunder Bay, Vancouver and Victoria. Winnipeg (again, surprisingly) was only the 18th least-active.

Despite being one of the more physically active cities, Thunder Bay residents couldn’t avoid the dubious honour of having the highest percentage of obese 20-64 year olds (20 percent reporting a Body Mass Index of greater than 30). Several cities that ranked significantly below the national average for obesity: Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Vancouver and Victoria (where only 10 percent reported a Body Mass Index in excess of 30). Winnipeg (16%) ranked 14th out of 25 for obesity.

Victoria, B.C.: Canada's least-obese city (© Brad Heyd; from Panoramio)

Finally, the key to boosting a city’s average life expectancy is to do many of the things your doctor would tell you to do. StatsCan found that cities with lower numbers of smokers, heavy drinkers and obese people were more likely to have higher average life expectancies. But education also makes a difference: as the proportion of city residents with a post-secondary education goes up, the average life expectancy tends to go up with it. Immigrants — who in many cases bring different dietary habits — also tend to have a favourable effect on average life expectancy.

Almost makes you wonder why we’re not hearing many ideas for making Winnipeg a more walkable or more relaxed city in the election campaign.* (And forget the “it’s cold” excuse: the daily maximum temperature is above 0°C an average of 248 days per year.)

Now excuse me as I give in to this sudden urge to eat a cucumber and go for a walk.

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* – Speaking of the election campaign, be sure to keep up with Brian Kelcey’s State of the City blog, for excellent analysis from a man who knows his way around City Hall very well, as the campaign moves forward.

Toxic Alaska, and other findings from the world of research

• Alaska the most toxic state in the U.S. It’s a favourite destination for the cruise ship lines because of its rugged wilderness, but it’s hardly unspoiled. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory, Alaska was home to the largest amount of toxic waste in the United States in 2008 — nearly 567.8 million pounds (257.5 million kilograms) of toxic releases. This put America’s northernmost state well ahead of runners-up Ohio, Utah, Indiana, Texas and Nevada. The least toxic state: Vermont (with lower counts registered in Guam, D.C., the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa, which are not technically ‘states’).

• The Meh Generation. A study from University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research came to the conclusion that today’s U.S. college students are more likely to be indifferent to the feelings of others than those of 20 or 30 years ago. The findings arise from “standard tests of this personality trait” undertaken in 72 studies of U.S. college students between 1979 and 2009 according to researcher Sara Konrath. This included lower levels of agreement with statements like ”I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.”

• Cannabis leaving people “dim and demented”. Researchers at the University of Wollongong in Australia have found further evidence that cannabis use has long-term negative effects on the brain. Despite finding evidence that cannabis users sometimes perform some tasks better than non-users due to the brain’s ability to adapt to changes caused by drug use, the buildup of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) that is associated with ongoing cannabis use makes even simple tasks more difficult to perform, and puts users at greater risk of developing dementia in later years. “It is kind of like if you are driving your car down a freeway and the freeway is the most efficient neural pathway,” explained clinical psychologist Robert Battista. “[Cannabis users might find] the road has potholes or there is fog so that it is more effortful, more resources have to go into doing that same task.”

• Outdoor breaks better than indoor breaks. Pity the poor industrial park worker who has nowhere to go for a walk on his or her break. A test of 537 students at the University of Rochester found that those who took a short break in natural, open-air surroundings were more refreshed by the experience than those who took indoor walks or who had more sedentary breaks. “”Often when we feel depleted we reach for a cup of coffee,” said University of Rochester psychology professor Richard Ryan, “but research suggests a better way to get energized is to connect with nature.”

• The one European city guaranteed not to be overrun by tourists. Parisians might be perpetually fed up with their city being overrun by les touristes, but it’s not a problem in Minsk, the capital city of Belarus. One critical reason: Mercer, the global human resources corporation, ranked Minsk as Europe’s worst city in a 2008 study, out of a total of 183 cities examined. The study, which looked at 39 factors for each city, was denounced as “pure political vileness” by one Minsk resident, a professor at the city’s National Technical University. Another resident, however, tended to agree with the study’s findings. “Here, the only places open at night are the casinos and train station,” the unnamed woman said.