Canada’s Best Places to Live 2017: Methodology

This is the 14th edition of MoneySense’s Best Places to Live 2017. It is a comprehensive data-driven snapshot of Canadian cities and towns. This year we rank 417 cities, which is nearly double the number of communities we looked at last year. Our report captures cities as small as 9,000 residents. There is no way to measure the intangible aspects of a city that give it personality and make it home: the quality of its restaurants, the proximity to family or even if it has beautiful sunsets. We focus on what can be measured to find cities that give residents tools they need to thrive and give new residents a reason to move there. We measure what can be measured from towns and cities across our provinces and territories. To identify the Best Places to Live in Canada we rank each community across 36 separate categories. A few minor changes were made to this year’s methodology to accommodate the approximately 200 new cities that were added. The changes, which are outlined below, went through a series of stress tests to ensure our changes didn’t arbitrarily affect our results. All of the demographic data was supplied by Environics Analytics. Additional data sources are noted below. The pie chart below illustrates how we weigh each category group for the main list: