The Best Place to Live

I have been working in Alberta, where there is an attitude that prevails along the lines of Central Canada screwing the West. I am really not sure how much we are really being screwed, but my attention as brought to the "Best City in the Country" study where one could make a point along these lines.

MoneySense Magazine has an interesting feature ranking Canadian cities. The complete details and methodology are posted under the features section at moneysense.ca. The list is thorough, with all cities in Canada of at least 10,000 people are used. All 123 of them.

The top 10 based on Economic, Real Estate, Weather, Amenities, and Attractions factors are:
1 Ottawa - Gatineau ON
2 Halifax NS
3 Québec QC
4 Guelph ON
5 Fredericton NB
6 Kingston ON
7 Moncton NB
8 London ON
9 Victoria BC
10 Gander NL


Although the results are highly subjective, I can see what they are getting at. Notice only one city west of Ontario makes the top 10.

The most important factor was the weather, which you would think would put Victoria on top along with several other BC cities. I could see weather being a significant factor in quality of life, but I suspect the people putting the ranking together are living in Ottawa because they conclude that ideally, a city should have "900 ml of precipitation per year" (Ottawa gets about 900mm per year). Also, when did they start measuring precipitation in ml? Isn't that a volume measurement? I will assume they mean mm.

So, if you live in a city like say Kamloops, do you say to yourself, "man, do I wish I lived in a city with triple the precip!"

The 10 driest cities in Canada are:
mm/year
Whitehorse YK 267.4
Kamloops BC 279.0
Yellowknife NT 280.2
Penticton BC 332.7
Medicine Hat AB 333.8
Swift Current SK 349.1
Saskatoon SK 350.0
Moose Jaw SK 365.1
North BattlefordSK 373.2
Kelowna BC 380.5

What they are telling us is that living in these dry places is like living in Prince Rupert which gets over 2500 mm/year.

Days over 30 degrees Celsius is also bad in this study.

Days over 30C/year
Kamloops BC 29.3
Penticton BC 25.9
Kelowna BC 25.0
Medicine Hat AB 23.6
Windsor ON 20.7
Moose Jaw SK 20.2
Estevan SK 19.5
Vernon BC 17.6
Chatham-Kent ON 16.2
Lethbridge AB 15.8

Notice, they did not include humidity in this study. If they would have Ottawa has 45 days per year that feel like 30 degrees or more, and Windsor 67. The Western cities listed above only go up by a few days because they are not humid cities. These hot Western Canadian cities cool down a lot more at night than even Ottawa. So if you like sleeping at night when it is cool, and chilling on the beach in the day when it is hot - your weird. There were some BC cities that don't ever hit 30 degrees (like Prince Rupert), so they even fudged the numbers to say they get 9.5 days per year of 30 degrees. I know this sounds far fetched, but it is the truth. you can look up the true number of 30 degree days in Prince Rupert at Environment Canada - where they say they got their info from!.

The second most important category was housing at 15 points. This really hits hard any BC cities with good weather.

The most expensive housing markets in Canada are:
City Prov Avg House
Kelowna BC 528,260
Vancouver BC 519,421
Victoria BC 509,240
Abbotsford BC 501,865
Squamish BC 428,517
Wood Buffalo AB 396,447 (AKA Fort MacMurray)
Nanaimo BC 373,342
Duncan BC 369,056
Calgary AB 361,611
Penticton BC 346,392

Air pollution was also ignored in this study which would have set most Ontario cities to the bottom of this category.

Points were given for attractions which favored larger cities (found more frequently in Central Canada). Cities like Kamloops or Kelowna only got 2 out of 4 for attractions because they are not capital cities and they have no professional sports teams. Ottawa of course gets 4 in this one. Vancouver also only gets 2 out of 4 because it apparently doesn't have a casino. They are considering the greater Vancouver area, so its hard to understand where they get that info from.

One could argue that there are so many cities in Ontario that of course they would have several on the top of the list. But then there should be several at the bottom too. Here are the 10 worst cities in Canada in which to live:

Port Alberni BC (worst)
Campbell River BC
Quesnel BC
Duncan BC
Williams Lake BC
Lachute QC
Cape Breton NS
Abbotsford BC
Val-D'Or QC
Powell River BC (10th worst)

What do you think?

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I rest my case.