Twitter confirms the joys of country living

Canada's rural and suburban dwellers are happier than their urban counterparts. That would seem to be the indication from data in "The Geography of Happiness: Connecting Twitter Sentiment and Expression, Demographics, and Objective Characteristics of Place" published in PLOS ONE.

While the article analyses US data only there is a map, figure 5, which includes Canadian locations showing happy and sad tweets by location during 2011. The image above is an extract. Red is happier, blue is sadder, black locations indicate an inadequate number of tweets to make the results meaningful.
Looking at Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal as well as Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse the urban centres show more sad tweet words than the suburbs and rural areas, although rural areas often don't have enough tweets.
Does this reflect the joy of a tranquil country life as experienced for generations?