Thursday, March 31, 2011

Best Places to Live in Canada: Kingston Among the Leaders.

MoneySense Magazine has announced its annual ranking of the best places to live in Canada. It uses a number of interesting metrics to rank the cities according to what it believes as key factors that would influence someone's municipal satisfaction. So, what are they and where is the best place to live?


The factors that they used are: weather, affordable housing, household income, discretionary income, new cars on road, job prospects, population growth, access to health care, walk/bike to work, and low crime rates. 


Of course, whether these are the same factors that you would use is arguable, but nonetheless it is a nice exercise in attempting to think about some municipal options that we have as Canadians.


According to the factors listed above, the best places to live in Canada are:



  1. Ottawa
  2. Victoria
  3. Burlington
  4. Kingston
  5. St. Albert
  6. Fredericton
  7. Brandon
  8. Edmonton
  9. Repentigny
  10. Winnipeg

Personally, one category that I was interested in, considering the spike in housing prices over the last decade, was "affordable housing." So where was the most affordable place to live in Canada?

  1. Cape Breton, NS
  2. Timmins, ON
  3. Bathurst, NB
  4. Portage la Prairie, MB
  5. Chatham-Kent, ON

Of course, there is more to finding the best place to live besides whether or not it is affordable. Jobs, cultural climate, etc. are all very important factors. And though it is not perfect, the MoneySense article does a fantastic job of getting the Intelligent Investor to start thinking about where might be the best place to live, work, retire, and spend some of their hard-earned dollars.

I highly suggest that you give more of the rankings a quick look at:

http://list.moneysense.ca/rankings/best-places-to-live/2011/Default.aspx?sp2=1&d1=a&sc1=0

Happy Investing!

1 comment:

  1. Nice information.I like the content of this post.Canada is no doubt nice place.

    ReplyDelete