Earlier this year, a Statistics Canada survey reported 26 per cent of Canadian households said they wouldn’t be able to cover an unexpected bill of $500 if one came along. With prices and interest rates higher now than they were then, that share may even have risen. Working harder is not the solution, however: a 2016 StatCan survey indicated Canadians were increasingly dissatisfied with the balance between their work and personal lives.

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Philip Cross: Statistics Canada feeding misperception Canadians on the brink of financial ruin Back to video

This notion that Canadians are under growing financial and time management stress is based on the questionable methodology that requires people to accurately assess themselves. As economist Thomas Sowell once observed, “Statistics compiled from what people say may be worse than useless.” There is precious little corroborating evidence that the finances of a significant share of Canadians are so precarious that even a small unexpected bill or loss of income would push them over the brink. Nor is there convincing data that Canadians are time-stressed — not because of excessive demands at work, at least.

Start with personal finances. Stories about how a significant number of people could not cope with even a small shock to their income or expenses have become a staple in journalism. Yet when COVID struck and millions of people were thrown out of work overnight, there was no surge in personal insolvencies or defaults despite governments taking a month or more to design and implement income replacement programs. People proved surprisingly resourceful and resilient about money when they were required to, just as ordinary people are capable of extraordinary feats and sacrifices when suddenly thrust into war (and are generally calm about it: a 1945 Gallup poll found almost two-thirds of Americans admitted not making “any real sacrifice for the war.”) The Bank of Canada resumed raising interest rates last week because Canadian households have kept on spending despite the squeeze from rising prices and higher interest rates.

As for work stress, on average people actually spend less time working than they used to. The American Time Use Survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a diary of how people actually use their time, found people did real, actual work for an average of just 3.5 hours a day in 2021, down from 3.8 hours in 2007 (remember that 40 per cent of people are not employed). (A recent NBER study by Raffaella Sadun reported CEOs work twice as much on average at 7.1 hours per day.) This is much less than the 9.7 hours spent on personal care (mostly sleeping) and 5.3 hours for leisure and sports, but more than for other activities like housework and shopping. What has increased markedly in recent years is time devoted to raising children, not time spent working.

Part of the problem is that time is often wasted. In her book The Long Game, Dorie Clark noted that time stress often reflects that “the average person has mountains of inefficiency in their day.” Being pressed for time usually reflects not sticking to a schedule, just as financial problems often come from a lack of discipline in managing personal finances.

In a survey by Salary.com, 89 per cent of respondents admitted to wasting time at work every day — on gossip, talking on the phone or browsing the internet — with fully a quarter saying they wasted two hours or more. Legendary financier T. Boone Pickens observed that for some people the challenge is to “work eight hours and sleep eight hours, and make sure that they are not the same eight hours.”

Psychologists know why people exaggerate the stress they feel at work. Pretending to always be busy working, in the words of Dorie Clark, means “we are implicitly suggesting that we are sought after, which enhances our perceived status.” Projecting an image of being crazy-busy is important to our self-esteem, showing “we’re popular, needed, in demand, good at what we do, and even able to juggle multiple projects simultaneously,” according to management expert Martin Lindstrom in his book The Ministry of Common Sense.

Not that there is anything wrong with being busy at work. In his popular book Flow, psychology professor Mihaly Cskiszentmihalyi documented what he calls “the paradox of work,” which is that humans are happier and more fulfilled at work than at leisure, which causes many people to feel bored and anxious. More broadly, humans are terrible at anticipating which activities will be satisfying to them. People say they want more leisure because of the social convention that leisure is more desirable, not because that is what they really feel.

Data from other countries confirm this discrepancy between what people say and their actual behaviour. British economist Philip Coggan noted that applications for the U.K. government’s incapacity benefit for people too sick to work rose from 400,000 in the 1970s to 2.6 million in 2011 although surveys of people’s self-assessment of health showed almost no change. Gregg Easterbrook, in his book The Sonic Boom, cited surveys showing a steady increase in the share of Americans who say “I can afford the things I want” — even as middle-class respondents grew more anxious about maintaining their lifestyle.

StatCan is doing us all a disservice by feeding the misperception that a significant number of Canadians are teetering on the brink of financial ruin and cannot work more without severely disrupting their personal lives and family well-being. The reality is that households proved resilient when faced with, first, the COVID shock and then rising prices and interest rates. If Canadians are feeling time-stressed, it is likely from devoting more attention to their children than increasing demands from work.

Philip Cross is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.