(For the full list and rankings, click here.)

If you want the scoop on which Canadian cities are the best places to live, Chris St. Clair is your go-to guy. After all, he crisscrosses the entire country every weekend. Well, not literally. St. Clair is a presenter on The Weather Network, where he gives country-wide forecasts to a national audience on Saturdays and Sundays.

During his long career as a broadcaster (and his former life as a commercial pilot), St. Clair has lived, worked or hung out in all of our major cities, so he knows what makes a great place to put down roots. He knows both the good and the bad in Halifax, for instance, since his family moved there when he was eight. “The summers are awesome, and the fall can be beautiful, but winter can be long and miserable,” he says.

St. Clair attended Acadia University in Wolfville, in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, where his father still lives. On his many trips back to the region, he’s noticed the types of changes that are happening in many communities across Canada. “Farmers are selling off their land and people are building large homes on large lots. Every time I go down, I’m stunned at how much development is taking place. It’s taking the rural charm out of it and making it a little more urban.”
His dad owned a construction company with an office in New Brunswick, so St. Clair has visited Fredericton and Moncton countless times. “Fredericton is a beautiful city. They’ve really done a nice job redeveloping their downtown.” He remembers being unimpressed with Moncton when he went there as child, but since then, thanks to one of the healthiest growth rates in the country, the city has come a long way.

While St. Clair has never lived in the West, he’s travelled throughout the Prairies, the Rocky Mountains and up and down the Pacific coast. One of his favourite cities is Victoria, but he wouldn’t live there—the houses are way too expensive. St. Clair and his wife Susan prefer small cities with lower living costs. Places like Kingston, Ont., where they settled almost 30 years ago. “I made a conscious choice not to live in Toronto. I couldn’t imagine living there and dealing with that traffic all the time.”

As St. Clair can attest, there are countless factors that contribute to a city’s livability. But in our annual survey, we go strictly by the numbers. There’s an old joke about a visitor to Lake Louise who quipped, “Sure, it’s beautiful. But if you take away the mountains, the lake, and the trees, what have you got?” In fact, that’s our starting point: we don’t give any marks for alpine scenery, sandy beaches, charming heritage buildings or other qualities that attract tourists. Instead, we focus on things we can quantify with hard data. We look at climate, because good weather really does make a city more livable. We concentrate on practical matters that are important for a person’s long-term happiness: affordable housing, prosperity, ease of travel, and good health care. We look for cities that show healthy growth, but aren’t sprawling out of control.

We refine our methodology each year, and we believe that this, MoneySense’s fifth annual ranking of Canada’s Best Places to Live, is better than ever. When we first started ranking communities, we covered fewer than a hundred—now we’re up to 179. We include every city or town of at least 10,000 people, but in the past, we lumped together communities under 100,000 in large metropolitan areas. This year, for the first time, we’ve separated out all suburbs of at least 50,000 people, which added a full 25 new cities to our survey.

As always, however, we don’t make it easy to score high marks. Although 105 points are up for grabs, only the top three places managed to score higher than 70. That’s because we rank each city from one to 179 in each category and assign full marks only to the winner. A city that ranks in the middle in a given category gets half the maximum, while the lowest-ranked gets only a tiny fraction of a point. In the end, the rankings look like the results of a bobsled race—some are separated by only a few tenths or even hundredths of a point.

The sunshine factor
As much as Canadians love to boast about our cold-hardiness, the fact is that most of us like mild temperatures and sun. That’s why weather is the most influential category in our rankings. We award a city up to six points in each of three areas: the amount of rain and snow, the number of wet days per year, and the number of days below freezing. Cities earn up to two additional points for air quality, as measured by the amount of ground-level ozone and particulate matter its residents are forced to breathe.

In the precipitation department, we look for the sweet spot of 700 mL of rain or snow annually. British Columbia communities lay at both extremes in this category: bone-dry communities in the interior such as Kelowna and Penticton scored low, as did soggy coastal cities such as Prince Rupert and Burnaby. Most of the cities that ranked high for fewest days with rain or snow were, not surprisingly, in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The Prairies are also home to many of our coldest cities. Thompson, Man., holds the title with a teeth-chattering 240 freezing days per year.