The Globe and Mail, a newspaper in southern Canada, has put out an interesting ranking of the 100 most livable cities in Canada.
Whitehorse comes in at #53 of 439 cities ranked, beating Norwich, Ontario (#54) but trailing Olds, Alberta (#52) and our friends in Fort McMurray (part of Wood Buffalo Regional Municipality at #51).
As with similar ranking for universities or workplaces, such exercises need to be taken with the clichéd grain of salt. Much depends on which metrics are chosen, and how they are weighted.
For example, the Globe’s “amenity” category gives a city zero points for the quality of local skiing but does award points for the number of chain locations per 10,000 population for things like donut shops and burger restaurants.
Nor does it include air quality or the percentage of your life spent in traffic, both things you notice if you leave Whitehorse to spend some time in the Big Smoke.
It also has some weird statistical black holes. Cities score points for the percentage of the population from visible minorities, but this does not include First Nations people despite such data being easily available in the last census. So Whitehorse and Yellowknife both score more than 30 points below the national average on “diversity,” despite having more than 15 per cent Indigenous people.
The Globe also dodged some politically sensitive topics, perhaps to avoid offending readers in certain provinces. For example, whether you can wear head coverings or symbols of your religion at work if you are a government worker or if you are allowed to send your kids to an English school are rather important dimensions of quality of life for many.
Nonetheless, despite the frost such things put on the windshield, the Globe dataset provides a fascinating view of the differences between top cities in Canada from Halifax to Whitehorse.
The Globe looked at 43 variables over 10 categories: economy, housing, demographics, health care, safety, education, community, amenities, transportation and climate. The economy and housing categories are more heavily weighted for their importance to day-to-day life.
I compared Whitehorse (#53) to four cities: Fort McMurray, Alta. (#51) as a northern resource town; Canmore, Alta. (#13) as a mountain lifestyle hub for telecommuters; Toronto, Ont. (#64) as a big city; and Victoria, British Columbia as the winner of the Globe’s #1 livability ranking.
It immediately becomes clear that how you personally weigh different attributes is critical.
Consider the ratio of average household income in a city to what the Globe calls “average primary real estate value.” It takes 3.5 years of average household income to buy the average home in Whitehorse, versus 2.2 years in Fort McMurray and (shockingly) over eight years in Toronto and Victoria. Even Canmore was over six years. This would be a decisive metric if you don’t already have a nestegg, but less relevant if you have a lot of money.
Whitehorse scores poorly compared to the national average in a number of important categories. As you may have guessed from months of coverage in the News, only 50 per cent of Whitehorse residents have a regular health care provider. That figure is 71 per cent in Fort McMurray, 87 per cent in Canmore, 84 per cent in Toronto and 69 per cent in Victoria.
Our city also scores 58 points below the national average on walkability, which is scored on the ability to walk to shops and services not the length and quality of local hiking trails. The Globe also marks us down for our rapid population growth, which is significantly higher than the national average. The logic here is such influxes strain local services and infrastructure (again, see recent stories in the News).
The Globe appears not to like winter. In addition to omitting skiing from amenities, it also docks points for days where the minimum temperature is less than the relatively balmy and arbitrary cutoff of -15C. We have 83 of those, compared to 11 in Toronto and zero in Victoria. On the other hand, the Globe also dislikes hot and humid weather. Toronto loses points for having 11 days where the Humidex is over 35, while we have none.
One unexpected finding on the Globe’s overall “climate” score is that Whitehorse scores 22nd out of the 439 cities. Despite losing points on the number of cold days, we have zero high-Humidex days, zero hot days over 30C and only two days with precipitation over 10mm.
On the crime front, Whitehorse along with Fort McMurray and Canmore are significantly below the national average. On the other hand, Victoria is 30 per cent above and Toronto is 86 per cent above.
One thing that probably will not surprise you is that Whitehorse scores strongly on “Strong sense of belonging to local community.” We score 80 per cent, while the other cities range from 63 per cent in Toronto to 69 per cent in Canmore.
Another factor such surveys struggle to capture is what the kids in Selkirk French Immersion might call the je-ne-sais-quoi of a city. I spoke to a former Ontarian who grew up near Norwich. When I shared how we pipped Norwich into 53rd place in the Globe survey, she remarked, “I have literally never heard of anything happening there.”
Fans of the Norwich Tigers would undoubtedly disagree.
But this underlines how subjective choosing a place to live is. In the big picture, all of the cities in the Globe’s top 100 are good places to live, and wonderful on some dimensions. If you like a small town with a strong sense of community, some Yukon adventure and real-estate prices that are less bonkers than many cities, Whitehorse looks pretty good.
You can scroll through the rankings the next time you experience another metric that is not on the Globe’s list: the number of times per year you are stuck in your car at Forty Below hoping your friend with the jumper cables arrives before your phone battery freezes.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist, author of the Aurore of the Yukon youth adventure novels and co-host of the Klondike Gold Rush History podcast. He won the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist.