The Big Story: And the best place to live in Canada is…

Over 400 Canadian communities enter, but only one triumphs.

Every year, MoneySense puts together a comprehensive statistical ranking of the best places to live in Canada. Ottawa has taken the top spot for the past two years, but there’s a new winner in 2018.

This year, the winner is Oakville, Ontario.

Claire Brownell heads up Reports and Rankings at Maclean’s, and was given the daunting task of balancing a ton of data to determine which city tops them all this year, and why.

What happens in the rankings for a smaller suburb like Oakville to knock one of Canada’s major cities off the top spot?

“It was really close. Oakville won by less than one point over Ottawa,” points out Brownell.

“Oakville did better in the crime category than Ottawa. It also did better in population growth. But Ottawa did better in commute, which makes a lot of sense,” she explains, noting the commute category is worth fewer points than the other two categories.

She joins Jordan Heath Rawlings in today’s “Big Story” podcast.

The winners and losers are fun, but it’s the way in which crunching the numbers tells us how our country is changing that’s fascinating.

There are several metrics involved in creating the ranking.

“We think there are a lot of things that make a city a great place to live that you can’t measure. Things like the beauty of the sunset or the waves crashing against the shore. Those are things not in the ranking. But there are all kinds of things you can measure. Things like the unemployment rate, incomes, and health care wait times,” she explains.

“We took all those data sources, I assigned a weighting to all of them – decide how important they are – and then that pops out with a ranking of the best places to live in Canada, from number one to number 415.”

“It’s (Oakville) a suburb of Toronto. If you’re not aware of it, it does have a certain reputation as being a place to live for rich people. There was a mansion on a lakefront that went on sale for $65 million a couple years ago,” explains Brownell.

“I actually grew up in Oakville. When I was growing up in the ’90s, Oakville wasn’t a very diverse place to live. And that has changed over time. Over the past 10 years, the percentage of visible minorities living in Oakville has gone from 18 to 30 per cent. And 30 per cent of the population speaks a language other than English or French. Oakville also won our subranking for the best places for new Canadians.”

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She admits the weighting for the various categories is subjective.

“We try to think about what the average person would care most about. The two most highly weighted categories are the wealth and economy category and affordability. Those two kind of balance each other out a little bit. You want a place where you can both make a nice income and get a good job, but you can also afford to live there — afford rent or afford a house.”

Toronto cracked the top 20 on the list this year, up over 110 spots to number 16.

Two other GTA cities made it into the top 10, Milton landed in 6th while Halton Hills came 10th.