The Decibel - Ranking Canada’s most livable cities

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

Where is the most livable city in Canada? The Globe and Mail ranked more than 400 cities across the country to find out. Using data to capture qualities that matter most – affordability, safety, education and access to amenities and health care – these rankings will help Canadians find the cities that are best for them, based on their own circumstances.The Globe’s data editor Mahima Singh and personal finance reporter Salmaan Farooqui join the show to explain the methodology behind the project and why a certain city on the west coast takes the top spot.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

Victoria was kind of a breath of fresh air. I mean, I knew to expect that it was going to be a really beautiful place. It's a coastal town. It's got the mountains around it. That's really stunning. But the downtown core was, you know, really sizable. It felt like a place you could kind of, you know, get lost in in a good way. The Globe's personal finance reporter, Salman Faruqi, went to Victoria, British Columbia, to find out if reality backed up the numbers. There actually is a really thriving sort of hospitality scene, so there's lots of restaurants and bars and that sort of thing.

You know, there was great places to shop. One of the days I was in Victoria, I rented a bike and I just decided to get around the city and look at it that way. And I have to say, I mean, it did really blow me away. I mean, you have to remember this was a November day, right? And it was still sunny. The weather was warm. I was biking without gloves. The infrastructure is just fantastic. I mean, there are so many separated bike lanes and these really big kind of bike paths, these rail trails that were made over old railways. You know, if you live in one of the neighborhoods surrounding downtown, it's only really like a five, ten minute commute on your bike

to really get into your workplace if you work and live in Victoria. The Globe and Mail recently launched an ambitious project to rank the most livable cities in Canada. At the top of that list is Victoria. And according to Sal, there are good reasons for that ranking. You have the coast, you have the mountains, it's really easy to access. But the other thing is that the climate is just so good in Victoria. It's not like Vancouver where it's super rainy over there. There's this little microclimate, and I really mean microclimate. I mean, if you drive up,

I think something like 30 minutes north, it's suddenly rainy again. But because of the way Victoria is shielded by the mountains, it is relatively sunny, especially compared to the whole area. And it doesn't rain a whole lot. And it has these nice, mild temperatures where, you know, people I talk to, they talked about going camping in February on a seaside camp spot, which, I mean, sounds crazy, but the campground was full the day that they did that in February.

It really is a place where you can kind of enjoy the outdoors. It seems like all the time. All of this natural beauty and high quality of life isn't a secret. It's made Victoria one of the fastest growing cities in Canada. StatsCan says the population has grown by 15 percent in the last decade. it's made Victoria one of the fastest growing cities in Canada. StatsCan says the population has grown by 15% in the last decade. But all that growth also has a downside. Victoria is dealing with a shortage in housing.

There is so much demand to live there and it's a relatively small space where it's confined geographically. It's not like they can expand outwards because they're confined by the ocean around them and the mountains around them. So it's not a simple question. And, you know, there is kind of this call for greater density, for more development. You know, in some of the statistics that we looked at, there are families still that are moving away. It's clearly a very livable place, but it seems like affordability is kind of this existential question for it, whether it can remain livable. There's a lot of factors that went into finding Canada's most livable cities. So today, we're speaking to Mahima Singh,

one of the globe's data journalists. Together with her colleague Chen Wang, she combed through mountains of data and weighed multiple factors to compile this list. Mahima is here to explain this project and why cities ranked the way they did. I'm Mainika Raman-Welms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Mahima, it's so great to finally have you on the podcast. Yeah, thank you. I'm excited to be here. So why did you want to develop a ranking for Canada's most livable cities?

In Canada, we spend a lot of time talking about housing prices. We're talking about affordability. But we spend much less time talking about what it actually means to live in that community. We're not talking about, does it have grocery stores? What is the health care system like? So I think our main goal was to have a more holistic approach, give a chance for our readers to think about livability in a more all-encompassing way. And that's why we have, apart from from yes, we have how expensive houses are, but we also have variables in our ranking that, you know, let's say how close you are to parks,

how close are you to movie theaters? What is the schooling system like? Or what does the healthcare access look like in that area? Yeah. So it's a much more wholesome way of looking at living. So as a data journalist, like what does it mean to think about livability? What are you looking at here? As a data journalist, we do a lot of number crunching. And mostly what we do is just analyze data and tell stories. And most of our work is in partnerships with other reporters. It's our job to go out there and figure out if we can do the math. So for this project, like I said, we mentioned we wanted to do a holistic sort of like,

is there a way to quantify what it means to make something livable? Can we like take numbers in? And obviously it's so subjective, right? Because like what you think means livable doesn't mean the same thing to someone else. But we're trying to find that middle ground. Like, is there a way we can give people a benchmark to figure out where to live? Yeah. So I think, you know, usually we don't try to get too bogged down in semantics here.

But Bohima, I think it's important to get maybe a little definition out of the way here. Because one of the most obvious questions I think a lot of people have is, you know, what qualifies as a city here? So let's dive into it. How did you define city? Right. So for city, we've used the Statistics Canada definition of a census subdivision. And that's what StatScan or Statistics Canada defines as a municipality. the statistics scanner definition of a census subdivision. And that's what StatScan, or Statistics Canada, defines as a municipality. So it's something that has their own municipal government, like a governing body.

And I think that is the main thing we decided to use because it's granular. We were trying to go for as inclusive as we could be. And when we looked at the list of CSDs, Canada has around 5,000 CSDs. And we were like, whoa, there's no way we can rank all this and we can do the math for it. So then we started thinking about how do we sort of like filter this list. So how did you filter it then? Yeah, we thought of population size being the main thing. Right now, we have like a 10,000 population cutoff. And that's sort of like the stat scan base as well, because they use it

for some of their own analysis and things like that. But also the reason why we chose 10,000 and not say 100,000 or something like that is because we also wanted to include smaller cities in the ranking. And then going back to our motivation for this project was to have people sort of like expand their thinking of where to live. Because instead of just thinking of going to the big cities because they'll have all the amenities, we're also trying to include, trying to like introduce the idea that Canada is such a big country.

There's so many cities here that you can think of to make your home. So we wanted to include that as well. And the final reason why we chose the 10,000 population is like if you meant anything smaller to include more cities, it would sort of like affect the data quality. Because if the city is too small, then we have a lot of data gaps, like the census, or we might not be able to collect that data. So to be complete, to make sure we had like clean data, whole data, 10,000 was a good benchmark for us.

Okay, yeah. So that makes sense. And this raises the next question, though, of like the factors that you include in this calculation. So this all goes into what you define as a livable city, right? So how do you define what factors make a city livable? I think we sat down as a team and we all sort of like just wrote down what we think is the best city for us individually. And what was so great is that we were such a varied team. So say, for example, me, I'm in my 30s, I live in a roommate situation. So what I thought was important for me was so different from someone else on the team, like one of my managers who has children, or someone who's just starting a family. But then when we tallied all of it up, some stuff did surface that were

common. And that's where we started from. And then, of course, we did research, we did a lot of like, research papers, and we looked at other projects that also exist out there to make sure we're kind of getting like a whole wholesome view of like, what does go into it? Yeah. So you said when you tallied all this stuff up, there were some common factors that were important. So what were those? And I guess that would be where you started this ranking. Exactly. So housing, of course. Everybody, you know, yeah, it makes sense why people talk so much about it. But so that was like a no-brainer there.

But then, of course, things like how close are we to a grocery store, health care, education, especially for like people wanting to know if daycares are available. And if there were someone who they had like an elderly person in their family, then it would be like retirement homes or senior care and stuff like that. How many variables did you take into account then? There were many, but then we had to sit and like cull it down because we did use third-party data. So based on what they had, we were able to like come up with 43 variables that we divided into 10 categories. And to also make more sense of the whole thing, we added two layers of weighting. Like for example, proximity to a grocery store gets weighed higher than proximity to a park because grocery store feels more important. But then when

we put them into categories, then the categories also get weighed differently. And that's where the sub-rankings come in because say like a sub-ranking for someone who is a newcomer versus a retiree, they would change how important the specific categories are for them. And that's where the weighting of the categories came in. So yeah, we had like two layers of basic weighting. So there's like kind of the main list of livable cities, but then you had all these sub-rankings. So like, you know, top cities for newcomers or for young adults. So this is really what you're referring to here.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's based on stages of life. So if, you know, you're raising kids, or you're starting a business, you just graduated college. So we have different stages in life. Basically, anything we envision people wanting to move cities, or like, why would they move? We also have something in there called midlife transition. So it's people who, let's say, empty nesters, maybe they want to like downsize or they want to move because of health reasons. But we try to be as like encompassing of all sort of different stages in life. Okay. So interesting. So sounds like you had 10 categories. Within that, you kind of had a bunch of subcategories. So these 10 categories, we've got housing, economy, demographics, healthcare, safety, education, community,

amenities, transportation, and climate. Okay. And then within those, so like, for example, within economy, I guess, or demographics, that gets broken down further then? Is that how it works? Right. So housing would be how much average shelter costs a household pays in that community and mortgage payments, property tax, that kind of stuff. And then climate would be how many days in a year, like the temperature goes over 30 degrees. We have something called community, sort of like talking about how close-knit or how you trust people in the community. We have those kind of variables as well. Safety is about crime, crime rates, and again, trusting the police. Yeah, there are so many variables, and it makes it really expensive and wholesome.

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of work here, and there's a lot of layers to what you're doing. And you talked about you're getting data and information from elsewhere. So I'm curious, where did you source all of this information from? Right. So we have partnered with Environics Analytics. It's this big data firm. And we get most of our data from them. But in places where we sort of find gaps, then we have had to look elsewhere. So say climate data is one of those things that we couldn't get from Environics. So then we got climate data from Environment and Climate Canada. And then rent data, which is also sort of, it exists with Enveronics, but it's a little nuanced there. But we wanted to be as simple as possible.

So we went to the CMHC, which is the Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation. I guess any other factors that, you know, you thought were important to look at in terms of livability, but, you know, you couldn't actually include because you didn't have the information? Yeah, one thing, again, going back to climate, we were thinking about climate risk. But how do you quantify that? And also Canada is so varied, like the coastal regions will have different type of disasters versus, say, BC that has wildfires. We're talking about, you know, hurricanes and storms and things like that. So we did do a lot of investigation into that. We had a lot of talk with Climate Canada about this.

But in the end, it was sort of a little complicated, something we hope to, like, better in our next run of the project. So after all of these calculations, we know that Victoria was the city that came out on top of the list. So, Mahima, when you look at all the factors that we just discussed here, what really drove Victoria into the top spot? So Victoria does really well on mostly all categories. Victoria ranks one in the whole country when it comes to amenities. And then it ranks five in transportation, three in climate, six in education. So it's really, really high up there. But a lot of readers also sort of like mentioned how unaffordable it is. The housing is really expensive. The economy is not so great.

And that makes sense because I'm seeing that on the data here. It does rank lower than average. But again, because- Yes, on housing and also on the economy. So because it ranked so high on all the other ones, it just pulled up the ranking. And that's why it's number one. We'll be back in a moment. So we know Victoria took the top spot, but what about the other big Canadian cities, Mahima?

Where do they rank? Yeah, so Toronto did make the top 100. It was at 64. And Winnipeg is number three, which is also a big shock. We get a lot of readers saying, oh, wow, that is very surprising. But then we also get readers coming in and saying, how did Montreal not make the list? Or how did Halifax not make the top 100? And do we know, like, yeah, why would that be? It's because I would imagine a lot of people think, of people think Montreal is a pretty great place to be. So, yeah. So, I guess, can you explain a little bit about that? Yeah, of course.

So, the answer is in how we've defined what the city is, the boundaries of the city. Again, going back to the CSD, the census subdivisions. So, if you look at Montreal as an example, it ranks around 144 on the list, which is pretty low. But the CSD of Montreal is pretty complicated because there are other CSDs, like, say, for example, Montreal, which I think majority of people assume is a part of Montreal when they think about it. It ranks pretty high on the list. It's at 11. But the CSD of Montreal on its own is pretty low.

Okay. So it's actually how, so like when I think of Montreal, I think of this bigger geographical area, but you're actually kind of dividing it up based on how it's segmented. Yes. Yeah, yeah. It has its own like municipality. Okay. Vancouver also made the list. It was 14. And Calgary was up there high. It's number eight. Wow. Yeah. So you mentioned Winnipeg as being number three, and some people found that surprising. So tell me, what made Winnipeg rank so high? Yeah, Winnipeg ranked really high. It scored number one in demographics in the whole country. Really? And demographics is one of those heavyweight categories that we have. So because it was number one and it's a heavy weighted category,

it got really, really pushed up. And then it also scores relatively high on transportation, amenities, education. So it does average on all the categories. So that's why it's pretty high up. The only thing it doesn't do good in is climate. And climate is something that we haven't like extremely weighted. It's weighted normally. So because it does really bad in climate and it's not really heavily weighted, it sort of, like, still holds that high rank. And when you say, when you talk about climate, is it because it's the extremes in Winnipeg, like really cold or really hot, basically? Yes, yeah. And that's what our climate category catalogs.

It's looking at the extremes. Are you extremely cold? Are you extremely wet? Or extremely hot? So, yeah. And you mentioned Winnipeg ranked really high in demographics. What you extremely cold? Are you extremely wet or extremely hot? So yeah. And you mentioned Winnipeg ranked really high in demographics. What does that mean? Like, what does that category include? So in demographics, we look at population change. So Winnipeg is growing. A lot of people are going to the city, moving to the city. And another thing we look at is diversity. So the kind of the demographics in the area.

So yeah, Winnipeg just number one. Number one in Canada. Yeah. Wow. Were there any trends that you noticed, Mahima, when you're doing these rankings? Yeah. I guess any trends that stood out to you? Yeah.

Some of the ones that were a little interesting to look at was just like most of BC ranks, like the top 10 are all BC in the climate category. Yeah, I did notice there were a lot of BC like high up on the list. Yeah, so BC ranks really high in climate. And also another thing that was interesting to look at was Ontario. They rank really high in health care. So again, top 10 all Ontario for health care. Interesting.

And one of the trends that I thought was very interesting personally was that now immigrants are sort of looking elsewhere to move. They're looking at midsize cities. They're looking at places in the prairies or, you know. And what was interesting is when we did the newcomer ranking, that sort of like showed the same trend. None of the big cities ended up like like there was no Toronto, there's a Vancouver, but the highest is Pit Meadows in BC, like that's number one city for newcomers. So sort of like, yeah, this makes sense because all the immigrants are also kind of moving away. And I guess that's kind of like when we're talking about Winnipeg ranking so high,

that's probably a factor there. True. Yeah. Yeah. It's because also one of the things is, like I mentioned in the beginning, is like for the sub-rankings, for the newcomers, we give different weights to different categories, right? Because as a newcomer, you probably care more about community, you care more about demographics, more about housing and less about amenities, less about education and things like that. So because of that, these cities like comeapai. So, Meema, this project has gotten a lot of attention, a lot of comments from people online as well. Some of them can be pretty spicy, I've noticed. People are very passionate about their cities. I guess, what kind of reaction, though, have you gotten from people since all of this was published?

Yeah, it's a mix. A lot of people are like, why didn't my city make the list? But some of my favorites have been, thank God the city made the list. Or like, thank you so much the city has made the list because no one's talking about these smaller cities that end up making the top 100. A mayor from a city emailed us and said he was really grateful because no one was talking about a city. And now reporters are calling him and people are doing interviews about the city.

So those are some of my personal favorites. So there's a mix of people out there. Yeah, but it's getting a lot of attention. Like people are kind of paying attention to this project. Yeah, and it was one of our things also. We wanted people to start talking about livability and start questioning what it really means. So just lastly here, Mihima, I mean, this project really is a lot bigger than just a list or a ranking. It's, as you say, there's lots of sublists.

It's also an interactive tool online, right? So can you just explain that part of it and how could people use it if they're interested? True. Yeah. So if you go online, you land on the main rankings page. That's where we rank the top 100. And also we have a little search box that we can type in your city's name. And even if it doesn't make the 100 list, the city will show up. And we give a lot more information about that city, not just the ranks. So if you click into the city, you'll get all this amazing information about, say, housing prices or the education levels. It'll also explain what are the top five industries that people have occupations in that town. It'll also talk about the languages spoken. So it's very in-depth. It's like a demographic profile of the entire city. Another thing that's really great about this project is we have something called Rank by Features. Once you click on that,

what that lets you do is you can pick what are the categories that you find more important to you. So say, for example, I really do not care about housing, but I care about the weather. So I can choose that weather is more important to me. housing is not, amenities is, and then it'll tailor the ranking based on what you choose. We envision this to be a multi-year project. We're trying to do this every year. We're hoping that we can see if the rankings change, and maybe five years down from the line, we can do a study on the rankings itself and say that Victoria changed over time or maybe a city like that wasn't in the top hundred suddenly jumped up.

So trying to like look at it in the more data perspective again and see if we can do sort of like an analysis of the rankings in the future. Mahima, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wells. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland,

and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow.