Canada’s best places to live

Toronto ranks as number 51

The third annual list of Canada’s Best Places to Live has just been published by Canadianbusiness.com. The list is designed to help measure as many different aspects of a community living as possible. You can use their findings in several ways. Perhaps you’re planning to relocate. Perhaps you’re looking to invest in real estate. Maybe you simply want to know how your community stacks up against its neighbours. Whatever your situation, there are some interesting facts here.

They’ve taken weather into account, of course. Jobs and home prices, too. They’ve also looked at crime, the availability of doctors, how easy it is to walk or bike to work, and more than a dozen other factors.

Unlike most listings of best cities, their ratings aren’t about who has the best scenery, or the best restaurants, or the best beaches. Instead, they’ve tried to suss out the factors “” many of them quiet and unobtrusive “” that make a community a good place to live. Where a city ends up on their list is not based upon judges’ opinions or popularity polls. It’s based on hard numbers. That means their Best Places to Live rankings are a relatively unbiased guide to Canadian communities.

This year, they provide you with information on 154 communities, up from 123 last year. Thanks to improved sources of data, they are now able to break out metropolitan areas into separate listings for communities of 100,000 or more. So while they previously ranked all the various communities within the Greater Toronto Area as one unit, they can now separately rate locales such as Mississauga, Markham and Oakville that used to be lumped together under the Toronto label. Similarly, they can break Vancouver down into separate entries for the City of Vancouver, Burnaby, Surrey and other surrounding communities.

To make their listings as useful as possible, they included factors such as air quality, in their 16 indicators for each community. The maximum number of points a community could earn was 104.

Here’s this year’s ranking of Canada’s best places to live »