MoneySense Lists Canada’s Best Places to Live 2014
By Lucas on Mar 21, 2014
St. Albert, Alberta
Every year, MoneySense magazine releases a comprehensive list of Canada’s Best Places to Live. For 2014, Toronto ranked 32 out of 201, but a few other Ontario cities made the top 10! The biggest winner of the year is definitely Alberta.
MoneySense determines the rankings based off information on Census Metropolitan Areas (CMA), Census Agglomeration (CA), and Census Subdivisions (CSD) from Statistics Canada. The demographic data was supplied by Environics Analytics, and MoneySense also sourced some select data from a variety of other organizations.
They ranked the cities against ones of similar size and overall. A population less than 100,000 is considered a small city, between 100,000 and 400,000 is mid-size, and over 400,000 is considered large.
Each city was ranked based on 34 categories, including walkability to work, transit, weather, unemployment, housing, doctors, crime, and amenities. There were 103 points available and each category was allotted a certain number of points based on its importance. For example, unemployment statistics are worth 10 points. So the city with the lowest unemployment rate received 10 points, and then the awarded points would decrease incrementally as the cities’ unemployment rates increased.
One thing that we found interesting about MoneySense’s methodology was that they had two categories dedicated to vehicles. One was called New Luxury Cars and the other, New Cars. “We view new car purchases as an indicator of wealth and consumer confidence,” explains Mark Brown of MoneySense.
We question whether this is a true indicator of “wealth and consumer confidence,” with large cities like Toronto and Vancouver developing to eliminate the need for a car. Granted, the two categories are only worth two points combined, so it probably doesn’t make that much of a difference, but it’s definitely something to consider for the next few years.
Another interesting piece of data is that the top ranked city in Canada in which to live, St. Albert, Alberta, only scored 71.51 points out of the possible 103. So based on MoneySense’s ranking system, all the cities in Canada have plenty of room to improve!
Listed below are the overall top 10 cities from MoneySense’s Best Places to Live 2014:
1) St. Albert, Alberta
2) Calgary, Alberta
3) Strathcona County, Alberta
4) Ottawa, Ontario
6) Boucherville, Quebec
8) Edmonton, Alberta
9) Regina, Saskatchewan
10) Quebec, Quebec
Do you agree with MoneySense’s rankings?
