Despite Canada’s overall high-life-satisfaction ranking, racialized immigrants experience lower satisfaction than Canadian-born, non-racialized individuals, a large national study has found.
The findings, published in PLOS Global Public Health on December 4, 2025, illustrate that life satisfaction differences in Canada are influenced by social factors, cardiovascular risk factor burden, access to health care, cost of prescription medications, race and immigration status.
Sonia Anand
“In this study we investigated what impacts life satisfaction in Canada. We examined a large and diverse group of people to better understand how health factors and social factors like health status, access to care, affordability, neighbourhood trust and language support intersect with immigration, racialization and discrimination,” said Sonia Anand, principal investigator of the Canadian Alliance for Healthy Hearts and Minds (CAHHM) study and senior scientist at PHRI.
The study included 8,063 adult Canadians recruited between 2014-2018 from communities across the country, including a subset of 2,142 immigrants. Of the participants, 54 per cent of them women, 27 per cent were immigrants and 19 per cent were racialized. The goal was to examine how life satisfaction varies by race and immigration status and to identify other factors which influence health and well-being.
Researchers looked at how factors like income, health, access to care, and ethnicity relate to how satisfied people feel with their lives. They used the Cantril Ladder, a simple global scale where people rate their life from 0 (worst possible) to 10 (best possible), to group participants as suffering (1–4), struggling (5–6), or thriving (7–10). While 71 per cent of participants were thriving, racialized immigrants reported significantly lower probability of thriving (57 per cent) compared to Canadian-born non-racialized participants (73 per cent). Factors linked to higher life satisfaction were older age, male sex, having trusted neighbours, and having a language-concordant family doctor. On the other hand, lower life satisfaction was associated with social disadvantage, female sex, having poorer cardiovascular health, inability to afford prescription medications, seeking care in an emergency department, and being racialized.
“Our findings reveal inequities beneath Canada’s high national life satisfaction score,” adds Anand. “We identified areas where change could make a difference, like improving access to language-concordant primary care, building neighbourhood trust, making medications affordable and optimizing cardiovascular health. These are practical steps that policymakers can work on to help close the well-being gap.”
The PHRI CAHHM study was funded by the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer (CPAC), Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada (HSF-Canada), and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
