Canada’s Best Places to Live 2011
Check out how your own community rated and why in 2011.
What makes a city or town a great place to live? Can a community’s “livability” be measured? MoneySense believes that, to a certain extent, it can.
Canada’s Best Places to Live 2011 is based on data compiled from 180 Canadian cities and towns with populations over 10,000 people. Cities were rated based on home affordability, climate, prosperity, crime rates, access to health care and lifestyle, with subcategories in each area. Points were also given for the categories of transit, ammenities and culture. These categories are not included in the online list but are included in the full spreadsheet available for download.
Scoring highly on this list is not unlike being a scratch golfer. A community need not be perfect in every category. Being above average in all categories is enough to crack the top 10. Having excellent health-care options and a low unemployment rate will certainly help a city’s chances, but these are cancelled out if it’s too dangerous to walk the streets at night and the air quality is terrible. Consistency is key.
This year, for the second time in a row, our top city was Ottawa with a score of 71.7 points out of a possible 105.
Top 25 Best Places to Live Map
Canada’s 25 top places to live 2011 include communities from coast to coast. Use the screen controls on the left side of the map to move around the country and zoom in on the featured cities. Click on each location to see that city’s rating in different categories and why it’s a great place to settle.
Galleries
The top 25 best places to live in Canada as ranked by MoneySense magazine.
These towns are struggling. Find out who they are.
Ten reasons that make this city the best.
Which cities have the best weather, the highest household income or the best job prospects.
How to use the Best Places List
Click through the different categories to find out how the cities performed. To download full spreadsheets click here
To see how we crunched the numbers, check out our full methodology
