I saw this headline, “Canada slips to 15^th place in annual World Happiness Report”.   Well, if that didn’t just make me want to crawl under the covers and hibernate till June.  Only the 15^th happiest country on the planet?   Parliament should take a break from fighting over the carbon tax to look into this immediately.   What’s the happiest country right now to take some lessons from?   That would be Finland…..for the 7^th year in a row by the way.   Then come Denmark, Sweden and Iceland in that order.   What is it with these Scandinavian countries?  Why are their people so happy?  They must embrace winter beyond our imagination.   If it makes you feel any better, the United States was 15^th last year but has fallen all the way to 23^rd.   No, I don’t feel any better.   We were in 13^th place last year but have been overtaken by Kuwait and Austria.   And we’re way behind Norway, the Netherlands, Austria, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand and Costa Rica when it comes to Happiness.  We should strike a “Happiness Committee” to travel to the 14 countries ahead of us to scope things out.  I’ll “happily” volunteer for that.  And we should find out why Canada sits at #15 on the World Happiness Index.  We’ll interview the Canadian economist and World Happiness Report founding editor who, for starters, believes negative news in English language media—and especially social media—can be blamed in part for Canada’s fall on the happiness scale.  Somehow we need to get Happy. Happy Happy in time for next year’s World Happiness report or else next thing you know we’ll be down there with the likes of Afghanistan at the bottom of the list. 

That’s Coffeetalk.  I’m Vic Dubois.