Quote:
Originally Posted by Drybrain
I wondered about that too, especially because Statcan actually produces "loneliness" statistics that show people in the Atlantic region report being "always or often" or "sometimes" lonely less often than the national average, and less than in Ontario, the prairies and BC (but more than Quebec).
Ultimately it seems like a pretty nebulous, subjective thing for a survey to nail down anyway. Does loneliness mean different things to different people? Maybe to someone in a region with high connectivity and many family and social ties, loneliness is more easily triggered, whereas people in a highly mobile area, with fewer deep ties and more casual ties, are less sensitive to it (or at least have a higher threshold for what they report as "loneliness.") Do people from different culture experience or report loneliness differently, leading to different responses in more multicultural areas? All hard to say. The Statcan data also shows, with the exception of Quebec, regional results that seem to differ by barely more than a margin of error. So I'm not sure it's that meaningful. |
Most of my family roots are in the Maritimes. I think I've mentioned before that the Maritimes are a bit of a feast or famine in terms of human contact. People are among the friendliest in Canada with strangers but forming true relationships is a lot more challenging than that friendliness would lead you to believe.
A decent-sized chunk of the population are from families who've been in the region since the 1800s and so all of their social networks are well-established and often you need a really good "in" in order to carve yourself out a spot in these circles. People aren't mean or anything - it's just force of habit to hang out with the same crowd.
I realize YMMV and a larger place like Halifax might be a bit different. But overall I have always found the Maritimes - even in the smaller cities - to trend this way.
It's admittedly a very satisfying and comfortable place to live for those who are "in" (and not saying it's that hard to achieve) but maybe not so fun for those who are left out for reasons XYZ. Or at least not really that much better than in a big allegedly impersonal city like Toronto.