Most people have strong feelings about the city they live in so rankings of ‘Best City’ and ‘Most Liveable City’ tend draw a lot of criticism.
MoneySense Magazine recently released its ranking of the best 417 places to live in Canada. The annual article added 217 communities to the list this year and it made quite a difference.
“We didn’t really know how that would affect the list and what surprised me the most was just how many of those new cities move to the top of list,” says Mark Brown, senior editor with MoneySense and the author of the article. “Toronto moved from 43 down to 129 – has less to do with changes in Toronto and more to do with the fact that these new communities were just that strong.”
While Ottawa topped the list, the Top 10 are mostly smaller cities close to larger urban centres, including Oak Bay and North Saanich, both of which are part of the Greater Victoria area.
“These smaller bedroom communities tend to have low unemployment, higher incomes and, because they were in close to major cities, they still had access to all of the same services that the cities offer.”
Prince George dropped from 127th last year to 182nd this year and Brown says that’s likely because many of the newly included cities bumped it down the list. In the BC and Territories ranking, Prince George is 40th out of 62 cities. We get high marks for low taxation – something Brown says most BC cities benefit from – affordable housing and accessible transit. Somewhat surprisingly, Prince George was ranked ahead of Greater Vancouver, Vernon and Penticton.
In the BC/Territories ranking, the top five cities in BC are all in the Greater Victoria area.
Another new feature this year is the interactive ranking feature, which allows users to adjust the various scoring categories to reflect their preferences.
“People often come back and say well that can’t be the best city,” Brown says. “We want to give people the power to actually go into make the ranking themselves. We have very strong views on what qualities make a city great but we recognize some people might think the weather is more important or having the crime rate at the lowest level is the most important. We wanted to turn that power over to people so they could see for themselves just what city would come out on top [for them]. Oddly, the more you play with the tool, the more you find just how strong certain cities are.”
Other ranking factors include arts and community, health accessibility and crime rates. ‘High Wealth & Incomes’ is also on the list, which could push wealthy communities, including places like Oak Bay, BC and Oakville, ON, higher up MoneySense’s rankings.
Brown says it takes some pretty extreme adjustments to bump Ottawa out of the top spot but, depending on what you’re looking for, even Colchester, N.S. – ranked 417th – could be your best city.
Here are the details on Prince George:
For a full list of rankings and the complete data set, click here.