canada

MoneySense Top 10 Best Places to Live in Canada in 2013

Remy Tremblay — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 00:09:50 -0400

Here we go again! Another ranking of the “best” places to live. I wonder how many of those there are. They just pop up on your computer screen like unwanted ads. Perhaps there are so many “best” cities rankings that at some point most cities end up winning or being in the top 10. Mayors and chambers of commerce know it, just like car companies. If you don’t win the top prize you will simply pick a category and exploit it to death to sell your product. It could be safety, trunk size, fuel efficiency, resale value. In the case of cities, it can be average house price, commuting time, unemployment rate, safety and the pièce de resistance, the vaguest criteria of all, the one that makes rankings such subjective tool: amenities.

What does it mean for MoneySense to be the best? A look at the methodology shows that the criteria are quite typical of most rankings: crime, amenities, commuting, heath, housing etc. Also, the number of points given to each criterion varies from one to another and are totally based on the mood of those who design the ranking. If you think that dry weather is important then you will give it more points. If you dislike bike paths you give it less point. If professional sport teams seem unimportant, you simply don’t use it as a criterion.

One big mistake that those guys do is to mess up distinctions between metropolitan areas and suburbs. Too often, they only include the boundaries of municipalities and break up larger cities into pieces even though they are really parts of greater metropolitan areas. For example, The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) has close to 6 million residents. The Municipality (or City) of Toronto has about 2.5 million people. Mississauga, a populous suburb of the GTA, but has its own place in the very same ranking. How can this be? This is major flaw, a very common one.

So let’s take look at the ranking. We indicate when a city was part of a Census Metropolitan area):

Calgary, Alberta
St. Albert, Alberta ( a suburb of the Census Metropolitan Area of Edmonton)
Burlington, Ontario (a suburb of the Census Metropolitan Are of Toronto)
Strathcona County, Alberta ( a suburb of the Census Metropolitan Area of Edmonton)
Oakville, Ontario (a suburb of the Census Metropolitan Are of Toronto)
Ottawa, Ontario (Since all suburbs of Ottawa has been amalgamated it couldn’t be broken down like Edmonton or Toronto)
Saanich, British Columbia ( a suburb of the Census Metropolitan Area of Victoria)
Lacombe, Alberta ( a suburb of the Census Metropolitan Area of Edmonton)
Lethbridge, Alberta
Newmarket, Ontario (a suburb of the Census Metropolitan Are of Toronto)

It would be hard to end up with a more flawed ranking. There is a mix of small cities (Lethbridge), the mid-size city of Ottawa, with suburbs that have been amalgamated into one unified City of Ottawa, without taking account that the Census Metropolitan Area includes the City of Gatineau, across the Ottawa River, in the Province of Québec. It is simply impossible to judge a suburb or a city that is part of a metropolitan area and ignore the fact that its amenities, transportation system, jobs, highways etc. are all linked. How would Mississauga’s economy perform if it wasn’t of Toronto, or its airport, (located in Mississauga!)? How would Ottawa do if they didn’t have its pool Gatineau and its pool of 75,000 civil servants living in its more affordable houses, commuting by across the Ottawa River by one of its 5 bridges?

I am not pro-gentrification nor a big fan of downtown living, at least not until my kids will live at home. I myself live in an Ontario suburb of Ottawa, while commuting by train to Montreal a few times a month. However, I am fully aware that my suburb would not exist if not for downtown Ottawa. When 75% of the labour force living in my suburb commutes to downtown Ottawa each day to go to work, if the city had not been amalgamated in 2000, I would have laughed at any ranking that would have considered my suburb as a stand- alone city.

Please guys, you do not rank cities like you rank sports teams.

2011 Canada Census: Strong Growth & Suburbanization Continues

Wendell Cox — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:51:06 -0500

Statistics Canada has just released the first results of the 2011 census. The nation's population rose to 33.5 million, from 31.6 million in 2006. This is a 5.9 percent growth rate, up from a 5.4 percent rate between 2001 and 2006 and nearly one-half above the 4.0 percent growth rate from 1996 to 2001.

Suburbanization continued apace in Canada's largest metropolitan areas. Overall, the suburbs accounted for 83 percent of the population growth in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, with 17 percent of the growth in the central municipalities. In the other major metropolitan areas (Ottawa-Gatineau, Calgary and Edmonton), the central municipalities themselves encompass nearly all of the suburban development, so that the core-suburban population increase proportion is masked.

Cities Have Outgrown Their Role as Mere Creatures of the Provinces

Steve Lafleur — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 17:36:15 -0400

The Martin Prosperity Institute recently released the map below, which compares the GDP of several US metropolitan areas to the size of national economies. For instance, the Boston-Cambridge-Quincy metropolitan statistical area (MSA) has a GDP of $311.3 billion dollars. If it were a country, it would be the 40th biggest national economy on earth, ahead of countries such as Denmark ($310.1) and Greece ($303.4). The Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown MSA has a GDP of $378.9 billion, which would make it the 31st biggest national economy, bigger than Austria ($375.5) and Argentina ($368.9). New York-Long Island-Northern New Jersey ($1.28 trillion) isn’t all that far behind Canada ($1.57 trillion).

While trotting out such comparisons is an interesting exercise, the comparison also gives us some important perspective. Despite the fact that these cities, as well as many others, produce as much as large countries, they have nowhere near the same fiscal levers at their disposal. Further, they are subservient to higher levels of government. The same problem exists in Canada. The Greater Toronto Area’s economic output ($233.9) is nearly equivalent to Finland’s total GDP ($270.6). Note that this definition is far less expansive than the US metro areas listed above. If the definition were expanded to include the entire Golden Horseshoe, it would be closer to the Size of Norway ($414.3 billion). Yet the City of Toronto can’t finance a public transit expansion without the two senior levels of government. Calgary ($62.5 billion), roughly the size of Lithuania, couldn’t decide to create a municipal sales tax. Vancouver ($85.5 billion), slightly bigger than Serbia, can’t even decide how to allocate gas tax dollars without a special deal with the federal government.

The problem isn’t that we have too little government spending, but that revenue collection and spending decisions often happen at the wrong level. Revenue generation and spending should take place as close as possible to the point of delivery. There is no reason why someone in Moose Jaw should pay federal income taxes so that the Federal Government could partner with the province of New Brunswick to build a highway near Moncton. Similarly, there’s no reason why someone in Edmonton should send property tax dollars to the province so that it can pay for a transit expansion in Calgary. Not only is filtering money through multiple layers of bureaucracy inefficient, but it leads to bad decision making. Decisions both on the revenue, and expenditure side need to be made at the lowest level of government possible.

In order to ensure that cities can meet their infrastructure requirements, provincial governments should gradually devolve spending responsibilities and revenue generating capacities to the municipalities, and the federal government should end the practice of intervening in infrastructure issues altogether. Some municipalities may choose to raise property taxes, others may increase user fees, and still others may experiment with municipal sales taxes. But regardless of how municipalities decide to raise revenue, they are better placed to determine how much revenue is required, and which projects are really essential. More importantly, devolution gives more direct control over decision making to the people that are actually impacted by the decisions. Devolution means more accountability, and more local input. And if tiny Iceland can fund it’s own infrastructure, there’s no reason why Winnipeg or Edmonton couldn’t do the same.

This piece originally appeared at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy Blog.

Steve Lafleur is a public policy analyst with the Frontier Center for Public Policy.

Oh, Canada? A Safe-Haven for Banking Investments

Susanne Trimbath — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:05:30 -0500

Looking for a safe haven for your banking investments? The Royal Bank of Canada is about three times the size of Citigroup, Royal Bank of Scotland or Deutsche Bank – and they haven’t cut their dividend in more than 70 years. Although Canadian banking profits declined double-digits last year, they actually had profits. Pretty much the rest of the world’s banks are reporting massive losses.

It seems the folks above the 49th parallel have been fiscally responsible. According to a story on Bloomberg.com “not one government penny” has been needed to support any Canadian bank “from British Columbia to Quebec” since the financial meltdown began in 2007. Not that the Canadian government left them out in the cold, either. A $C218 billion fund was set up last October – ostensibly to be sure Canadian banks could compete in international markets with all the government-backed banks in the rest of the world – but none of the banks took any of it.

According to Bloomberg, European governments “committed more than 1.2 trillion Euros ($1.5 trillion) to save their banking systems from collapse.” As close as I can tell, between the Federal Reserve and Treasury, the US has poured over $3 trillion down the drain of financial institutions.

(To understand the complications in calculating an exact U.S. amount, see my earlier articles for more information on how the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, under now-Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner, funneled money through Delaware limited liability companies to non-bank entities.)

Only 7 banks in the world have triple-A credit ratings – 2 of them are Canadian. While the rest of the developed, industrial nations are pouring hundreds of billions each down the black hole that is their financial systems, our Neighbors to the North were engaging in “solid funding and conservative consumer lending.”

Canada is the only member of the G-7 to have balanced their budget 11 years in a row. Immigrating to Canada is looking like a better idea all the time.

What a Difference 1500 Miles Makes

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:16:44 -0400

After several days in New York, I encountered serious climate change — in terms of atmosphere — at a USA-Canada Summit in Grand Forks, ND. Sure people were concerned about the market meltdown, but the talk was all of new plans for expanding the economy across both sides of the border. The distressed martinis of Manhattan nights were gone in a place where drinks also came with good cheer.

Perhaps most inspiring was an appearance by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) who spoke of the economic crisis but in terms far less hyperbolic than those used by many members of Congress and most of the media. He compared to the current crisis to a low tide that has exposed some weak points in the economy but has not fundamentally altered the underlying strength of what he called “the real economy”.

This includes the manufacturing, farm, energy and business services firms that are flourishing across large parts of the country, particularly in the Heartland. Firms representing these industries at the conference were not whining about competition or the credit crunch, but talking about cooperation across the border and the prospect of a better future.

How refreshing it would be if either of the two major candidates, particularly Senator Obama, the likely winner, spoke with such confidence about the intrinsic strengths of the country and this continent in general. I would not deny the real significance of the stock market crash and the real estate mess, but, as Senator Dorgan suggested, “optimism” about the future has been a primary driver of American progress since the founding.

Let’s hope Senator Obama, or Senator McCain, lose some of their negative rhetoric when they take office. It may be good politics now to be a nay-sayer, but as President, these fellows will need to comprehend the country’s fundamental strengths and how to utilize them to make a strong recovery.