Canada's Best Places to Live 2007
Phil Froats and Duncan Hood
From the April 2007 issue of MoneySense
If you had the opportunity to create the ideal Canadian city from scratch, what would it be like? If it was up to us, this ideal community would have the well paid jobs of Toronto, but the commuting times of Medicine Hat, Alta. It would have the vibrant culture of Montreal, but the low crime rate of Corner Brook, Nfld. It would have the sushi restaurants of Vancouver, but the affordable houses of Swift Current, Sask. In short, this perfect place would have the buzz, the prosperity and the amenities of a metropolis and the rolling lawns, safe neighborhoods and lower living costs of a small town.
But does such a place actually exist? To find out, we ranked the best places to live in Canada. We began this exercise last year when we published our first guide to Canada's best places to live. This year we're back with an expanded and improved ranking. Our 2007 Best Places to Live spans 123 communities from coast to coast. It is the most complete and objective guide we know of to finding paradise within Canada's borders. Whether you're considering a move, looking to invest, pondering where to retire, or simply wondering how your city rates against others, our ranking can provide you with the insights you need.
At the risk of sounding immodest, let us say that our complete Best Places to Live database (which you can see here) goes miles further than the usual tourist-board drivel about pretty scenery and friendly townsfolk. Our goal was to find the places where you could happily spend the rest of your life. Many of our best places to live may not wow you at first glance. Rather they're places that quietly supply their happy residents with good weather, good jobs and a high standard of living.
To ensure our objectivity, we ranked communities strictly by the numbers. We spent weeks digging up statistics and crunching thousands of figures in the mother of all spreadsheets. Here's what we looked at:
The sunshine factor
This year, like last, our first category was the weather. This is Canada, after all, and there's a good reason that 99% of our population is huddled along the southern border. We figured that the fairest way to judge the weather is to assume that most people like a moderate climate that's almost Mediterranean in nature (or as close as Canada gets). So we rewarded communities that suffer relatively few days below zero. We also gave points to places with relatively few 30 degree-plus scorchers. Finally, we marked up places with lots of sunny days, since nothing spoils paradise faster than a long stretch of cloudy, grey weather. Canada's overall weather stars turn out to be Cobourg, Ont., and Leamington, Ont., while Powell River, B.C., Vancouver and Victoria take honors for the fewest number of days below zero.
Home cheap home
Nice weather only goes so far, of course. To enter the climatological paradise of Victoria, you have to pay more than $500,000 for an average home. Those high prices are great if you already own a home in the city, but for our listing to be useful to newcomers, we had to factor in the economic realities of life, particularly the cost of housing. We began by giving top marks to the places with the cheapest homes, then we tempered this ranking by also looking at how affordable homes are for local residents.
Perfect pay
Next we looked at income levels. After all, a town where everyone gets paid well has got to be a good place to live, right? Well, yes and no. Rated by average income alone, it turns out that the best place to live in Canada is the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, Alta., which contains the city of Fort McMurray. The average family income there is a stunning $135,500 a year, but Fort McMurray, which is on a tear due to the hell-for-leather development of the nearby oil sands, does have a few drawbacks ― like the fact that it's hundreds of kilometres from anywhere, with brutally cold winters and a booming economy that's straining the town's infrastructure at its seams. The best solution we could find to the problems posed by boomtowns like this was to award points for high income while trying to balance our ranking by also looking at various lifestyle factors.
Nice life
What are those lifestyle factors, you ask? We gave points for low unemployment. We also awarded points to communities where a high proportion of residents walk or bike to work, on the assumption that a lot of foot traffic indicates a city is both accessible and safe. We handed out points for amenities such as public transit and universities, and attractions such as theatres and sports teams. Finally, we measured how fast a city was growing. We reasoned that the ideal city would be so attractive that it would draw in newcomers and enjoy a population growth rate higher than the national average. On the other hand, it wouldn't be growing so fast that it would degenerate into a sprawl of hastily built apartment houses and shopping malls. We figured the ideal growth rate would be about two percentage points faster than the national average, so we gave top marks to places that came closest to a growth rate of just under 7.5% between 2001 and 2007. A city lost points if it was growing either faster or slower than this ideal figure.
Real wealth
One of the major new factors we've added this year is points for people's discretionary income ― in other words, how much they have left at the end of the month after the bills have been paid. We did this because salaries are higher in big cities such as Toronto and northern communities such as Yellowknife, but you aren't necessarily richer if you're carrying a $700,000 mortgage on your three-bedroom bungalow in Toronto or paying $7 for four litres of milk in Yellowknife. In cases like this, discretionary income is a better measure than raw income of how affluent people actually feel.
Crime and punishment
We've also incorporated crime in our ratings, awarding extra points to communities that have lower-than-average homicide rates and deducting points from cities that have higher-than-average homicide levels.
Signs of prosperity
This year's ranking awards points based on the number of doctors and other health professionals that live in each community. Not only is this number a good marker as to the level of health care you can expect if you move there, but it's also a good indicator of a community's overall attractiveness, since doctors and nurses are mobile and can usually find employment wherever they choose. To further gauge each community's prosperity, we looked at the percentage of new cars on the road. Not only do swarms of new cars demonstrate buckets of disposable income, they also suggest a certain amount of civic pride.
To find our winners, we ranked all 123 communities in Canada that have a population of 10,000 or more and for which we could find the necessary data. We then combined the scores to create an overall ranking.
So which cities offer it all? (And where did your home town rank?) Click here to find out.
For more on our winners, including the places with the best weather, the places with the highest incomes, and the best places to retire to in Canada, pick up a copy of the May 2007 issue of MoneySense magazine.
根据Economic， Real Estate， Weather， Amenities， Attractions得到的排名如下：
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/ran...=2007&page=1&customView=&customCols=&content=
