Canada's best places to live

MoneySense magazine sought the best places to live in Canada. What they found might surprise you.

Tim Whitehead From the April 2006 issue of MoneySense

If you play Monopoly you know that the best places to own are Boardwalk, Park Place and Pennsylvania Avenue. In real life, though, figuring out the best places to live is a far more difficult question. How do you stack up the cosmopolitan pleasures of Montreal or Toronto versus the picture-postcard charm of Chester, N.S., or the spectacular mountain scenery of Whistler, B.C.? What do you say when your father-in-law announces that he can't imagine raising kids in the place you've decided to call home, or your cousin mentions to everyone at your family reunion that his town is a lot nicer than yours?

One solution — not recommended — is to settle the matter with fists. A better plan is to impartially figure out which communities actually do have the best combination of natural advantages and economic good fortune.

That's what we set out to do. We started by pulling data for 108 communities of more than 10,000 people. We then crunched truckloads of numbers to discover the very best places to live in Canada.

Rank
1 Leamington ON
2 Guelph ON
3 Lloydminster SK
4 Grande Prairie AB
5 Kitchener ON 4
6 Cobourg ON 8
7 Hamilton ON
8 Red Deer AB
9 Calgary AB
10 Halifax NS