Perhaps you’ve seen that arresting Covenant House ad — the one of a homeless teenager in a bus shelter, ignored by the adults who pass her by.
Eventually, the teenager is replaced by a distressed baby, alone in the bus shelter, accompanied by the words, “How young do they have to be before we give a damn?”
That’s how we felt this week, with the release of the 2026 World Happiness Report. The report shows Canadians have slipped from being the world’s sixth happiest people a decade ago to its 25th happiest today.
Young Canadians are the drivers of this fall; if you isolate for Canadians under 25, Canada ranks 71st globally.
The report generated all the fanfare you would expect it to generate from our current leaders, which is to say, precious little.
To continue with the theme, this is a damn shame. If Canada had shown a comparable drop in GDP, you can bet Prime Minister Mark Carney would have been out there promising to right the ship.
What is so striking about Canada’s failure to address its youth crisis is that its causes are not unknown.
Two weeks ago, we wrote about the 2025 Global Mind Health Report, which showed nearly half of Canadians under 35 have mental health challenges that substantially impact their ability to function productively in everyday life.
That report identified smartphones at a young age as one of just four factors that are most predictive of low mind health. (The other three are diminished family bonds, diminished spirituality, and increased consumption of ultra-processed foods.)
The World Happiness Report is even more pointed in its focus, with this year’s report focusing on social media use.
“In North America and Western Europe, young people are much less happy than 15 years ago,” the report says. “Over the same period, social media use has greatly increased. … The evidence in this report does suggest that heavy social media use … provides an important part of the explanation.”
The report notes that “seven lines of evidence,” including surveys, studies and experiments, show social media use is not reasonably safe as a product for children and adolescents.
“We show there is now overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread direct harms (such as cyberbullying and sextortion), and compelling evidence of troubling indirect harms (such as depression).
“Furthermore, we show that the harms and risks to individual users are so diverse and vast in scope that they justify the view that social media is causing harm at a population level.”
Let that sink in for a moment. We have evidence that the products used ubiquitously by our kids are causing population-level harm. Meanwhile, Canada has effectively no measures in place to regulate these products.
Consider as well the haste with which other countries are acting now that they are aware of the harms.
Last April, France’s president Emmanuel Macron arranged a last-minute tête-à-tête with Professor Jonathan Haidt, the world’s foremost authority on social media harms, after learning he was in the country.
Haidt took Macron through the data on social media harms, Haidt later told the New York Times.
“We will act,” Haidt says Macron told him as they were saying goodbye.
And they did. Nine months later, in January, French lawmakers approved a bill banning social media for children under 15.
Australia, Denmark, Indonesia, Malaysia, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and states in the U.S. and India have all also implemented, or in the process of implementing, similar bans.
Ottawa, by contrast, has dithered for nearly half a decade to pass a bill that would address merely the most egregious forms of online harms, such as sextortion.
A year into the Carney government’s tenure, that bill is still not passed.
There have been reports that Ottawa is considering adding a social media ban for kids under 14 to this bill, but the government has provided few details.
Given the Liberals’ rocky — even shady — history of trying to pass online harms legislation, a drastic course correction is needed. The government should be out in front of this issue.
And by government, we do not mean the heritage minister, whom almost no Canadians would be able to identify or name. We mean Carney and our premiers.
These leaders need to communicate to Canadians about social media’s harms and their plans to address them. Doing so would signal Canada finally understands the stakes and is taking young people’s well-being seriously.
To his credit, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre talks consistently about Canada’s young people’s struggles in the interviews he gives, including recent ones with journalists Peter Mansbridge and Paul Wells.
Poilievre’s focus tends to be on high housing and living costs, as well as labour market shifts, which leave young people feeling disenfranchised and anxious. These are other critical factors that must be addressed as well.
But we would like to see Poilievre and all leaders add social media products to their list of priorities.
Our young people are our most precious responsibilities. They are also our future. If they are not well, it does not bode well for Canada’s future.
What a disappointing article. Not only have you failed to address why young adults are actually depressed, but you used it as a means to yell into the void of “politician XYZ should have thought of this already”. We are not depressed exclusively because of social media. Yes, it’s dangerous for children. We are depressed because every generation that came before us collectively voted to bypass all of the economic, financial, environmental, and future problems of this nation on us so they could revel in their current economic high. Do better, stop using click-bait headlines, and factually report.
Agree. Well said.
Social media is making youth unhappy? Are you serious?
What’s making them unhappy is having their future stolen out from under them. They’ve been replaced in society, the workforce and in postsecondary education with third world migrants. They’re bottom tier citizens in their own country. Would that make you happy?
Try imagining a life where you can’t even step outside your door and see people who look, act, or think like you. Try having NO chance at ever getting an education because the govt just cut your student assistance program, while having to watch as more hordes of third world migrants arrive and cash in on free educations, lavish social benefits and preferential access to jobs. Try getting your first job when all of the entry level jobs are filled with direct “temporary” hires from third world countries. Try watching people who have only been here a few years buying mansions and driving luxury cars while you’re wondering if you’ll ever be able to afford to rent an apartment.
And even if you manage to find a job, it won’t pay enough to cover your bills, and you’ll have to work 3 or 4 jobs to make ends meet. And 50% or more of what little you earn will be taxed to pay for someone else’s lifestyle. Meanwhile you’re always a paycheque away from sleeping in a bus shelter, like the ad mentioned in your article. And you’ll NEVER have enough to save for your own retirement, because you’re too busy paying for the elderly foreigners being invited here by your government.
Try having NO chance at ever owning your own home. NO chance of ever being able to afford to have children. How about not being able to go outside without the threat of being mugged or simply attacked “at random”? Or worrying that someone will kick your door down, or steal your car? Someone who, if caught, will be back on the streets in a few hours to do it again.
How about having to worry that if you get sick you’ll have to wait months or years for treatment? Or you’ll die on the floor of the ER waiting days for care? Or, when/if you get old, you’ll die on a stretcher in a filthy hospital hallway?
And you think social media is the reason today’s youth are miserable? Wake up.
So negative!.. Get out there and make a difference. Life is actually pretty good if you’re willing to give it a try!
bwa
Might be a good idea for this publication to provide real education about immigration, because there are way more myths out there than there is truth. It’s not the immigrants, it’s successive governments cuts to programs that help Canadians with the money moving up to the wealthiest Canadians, who don’t care about anybody. These entities love to see you tear up the immigrants, because it takes the focus off the real villains.
When young people get off their butts, turn off social media and do something useful they’ll be a lot happier. Not everyone can be a social media influencers!
Clearly you’re as clueless as the author(s) of this article. In case you hadn’t noticed, the article, and my post, are about the many reasons Canadian youth are unhappy, so of course they’re negative!
I’m forced to wonder if you are one of those who is benefiting from the destruction of young people’s lives. Blaming others you care nothing about for their situation, blowing off their problems, arrogantly bloviating about “positivity” and “getting off butts”. If you want “positivity”, “get off your butt” and find an article about sunshine and unicorns to prattle about.
Canadian youth would be in a better situation if they weren’t forced to share the country with self righteous, ignorant people with attitudes like yours.
This brings to mind the CCR recording “Fortunate Son”. It well may have been written about someone just like Trump.
During the Vietnam War many of the Fortunate Sons dodged the draft by one means or another.
Further, according to a September 2020 report by The Atlantic, later corroborated by other media outlets, Donald Trump allegedly referred to American fallen soldiers as “losers” and “suckers” for getting killed in action.
To top that what he said about John McCain was atrocious. At the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa on July 18, 2015, Donald Trump questioned the war hero status of Senator John McCain, who was a prisoner of war (POW) in Vietnam for over five years, stating:
“He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured”.
All this while never serving.
For him to call anyone a coward is quite rich.