Tom Fallath, centre, waves a Canadian flag at a Resist Tyranny Tuesdays protest in Albuquerque, N.M., on March 18.Ramsay de Give/The Globe and Mail
Mute, just for a minute, the American politicians slinging malicious rhetoric. Tom Fallath, a retired textbook sales rep in Albuquerque, N.M., has something comforting to say to Canadians.
“You are a good neighbour and a great country. I hope you know how many of us are on your side.”
Mr. Fallath began waving a Canada flag at anti-Trump protests after the Canadian hockey team defeated the Americans in the final game of the 4 Nations tournament in February.
Watching the showdown on TV, he was already angry about President Donald Trump’s insulting annexation snipes toward a country he’d admired since attending high school and university in Toronto.
“Good for you,” he thought, when the fans in red-and-white booed his country’s national anthem. When Connor McDavid scored the winning goal in overtime, he cheered.
But what really choked him up, he says, happened later, in the near-empty Boston arena, when the Maple Leaf was raised in victory, and Canadian players and fans stood for a defiant version of O Canada.
“They sang it at the top of their lungs,” Mr. Fallath recalls. “They sang it like they really meant it. I got choked up when I saw that.”
That week, the 77-year-old bought a Canadian flag.
Mr. Fallath is one person feeling another’s pain and, quite literally, waving a standard to signal his support. Unfortunately, people like him are often drowned out by louder, negative voices – at the cost of our well-being, and the chance to forge connections with allies.
According to a timely chapter in the 2025 World Happiness report released last week, human beings often suffer from an “empathy perception gap.” We can have nine positive interactions with strangers but the 10th bad encounter will be most remembered, exaggerating a negative perception, explains Jamil Zaki, a psychology professor at Stanford University who co-authored the chapter with postdoctoral fellow Rui Pei.
As a result, Dr. Zaki says, we misjudge how much people want to connect and help. But receiving and giving social support – as well as believing that you live in a caring community – contributes significantly to happiness, both for individuals and society as whole. By that measure, fostering Canada’s united response to our current political pressure may prove good for our collective well-being.
We could use the boost. Canada is still the happiest G7 nation, ranking 18th out of 147 countries. That puts us ahead of the United Kingdom (23) and the United States (24), but well behind Finland (1) and the rest of those joyful Scandinavian countries. And the trend isn’t positive: Over the past decade, we’ve fallen out of the top 10. Our social support scores are significantly less stellar; for instance, when it came to helping a stranger at least once in the past month, Canada ranked 47th.
Numerous studies suggest that the addictive negativity of social media is one reason why happiness has been steadily slipping in many Western countries. With sites such as Facebook and X amplifying the worst of human behaviour for clicks, it’s only natural that people play it safe when interacting with strangers, says Dr. Zaki, who recently published the book Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.
“It hurts more to trust someone and be betrayed,” he says, “than not to trust in the first place.” The cost of a connection we never had is invisible. But long term, “we end up sadder and meaner.”
People participate in the Resist Tyranny Tuesdays protest, organized by Indivisible Albuquerque.Ramsay de Give/The Globe and Mail
Cynics are typically viewed as smarter and more successful than those who believe people are generally good. Psychologists call this belief the “cynical genius illusion,” because it’s not true. Compared with those who are more trusting, cynics actually earn less, experience more health problems and have poorer relationships on average, Dr. Zaki says. In experiments, they are not as good at catching liars as more positive people.
Rather than being so negative that you trust no one, or so positive you foolishly trust anyone, Dr. Zaki makes the case in his book for being a “hopeful skeptic.” This involves keeping an open mind about a stranger, and collecting evidence before making a decision about character.
At Stanford, Dr. Zaki and his team performed an experiment to determine whether the empathy perception gap could be closed, using two years of data from a large-scale campus survey about empathy and social support. They found that the vast majority of the university’s students wanted to make new friends and help those who were struggling.
To communicate the overwhelmingly positive findings, researchers delivered workshops on the survey results and hung posters around campus with statements such as, “95 per cent of Stanford students are likely to help others who are feeling down.” After being exposed to the empathy data, students reported taking more social risks, such as talking to people they didn’t know.
A second experiment that used regular texts messages to highlight the results found that, compared with the control group, students who received the phone nudges were 89 per cent more likely to reach out to a peer for support or talk to a stranger. Two months later, they were still twice as likely to attend an event where they didn’t know anyone.
The best part, Dr. Zaki says, is that researchers didn’t have to lie about the level of empathy among students. “We just had to show the truth.”
Canadians can look around as well. Across the country, strangers have spontaneously united. On social media, Europeans are posting their support, vowing to prioritize Canadian products when they shop. And U.S. polls suggest that Mr. Fallath is not an outlier; the majority of Americans have no interest in annexing Canada, especially against our will.
“It’s really easy to rely on stereotypes like the loud, mean American,” Dr. Zaki says, and to allow those loudest voices to control the conversation. But average Americans and Canadians would do well, he suggests, to meet on common ground and close ranks with empathy and support.
That’s exactly what happened, at a protest in front of Albuquerque’s City Hall, the first time Mr. Fallath waved the lone Maple Leaf among a flock of Stars and Stripes and signs that read “We Don’t Have Kings Here.” At first, he felt a little nervous, he says, uncertain how his choice of flag would go over.
But then a few Americans asked him questions about Canada. And a trio of Canadians emerged from the crowd of 300 people to offer high-fives. One greeting led to an enthusiastic rendition of the Canadian national anthem.
Mr. Fallath went home uplifted, despite his worry and shame about the direction being taken in Washington. He’s since brought the Canadian flag to more protests and plans to keep doing so. That day, at City Hall, “it felt like I wasn’t alone.” And neither, he says, are Canadians.
