Among its recommendations for the measurement of subjective well-being, the OECD views life evaluation as the most important and advocates a life satisfaction question as the primary measure, with responses being given on a scale of 0 to 10. For the past several years Statistics Canada has been asking precisely this question on the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) and the General Social Survey (GSS). Together, annual data from these surveys now provide almost 340,000 individual responses—enough to permit, for the first time, the preparation of comparable community-level measures of life satisfaction for 33 census metropolitan areas (CMAs) and 58 economic regions (ERs) across the country.

This article highlights these data by providing an overview of the life satisfaction expressed by individuals in CMAs and ERs across Canada. The article first presents life satisfaction scores across CMAs and ERs on an unadjusted basis; that is, without taking into account the socio-economic characteristics of individuals in those areas. Individual-level socio-economic characteristics are subsequently taken into account, reducing variations in life satisfaction across CMAsonly slightly. The extent to which specific economic and social factors explain variations in life satisfaction across communities and regions is beyond the scope of this article. The main objectives here are to document the magnitude of those differences and richness of Statistics Canada data now available to explore them further.