City rankings drop as others join list
MoneySense magazine names Canada’s best places to live
St. Catharines Mayor Walter Sendzik has turned to social media to defend the city’s reputation after it was ranked 234th in the country by MoneySense magazine.
The annual rankings of Canada’s best places to live saw St. Catharines, Niagara Falls and Welland unable to crack the top half of the list of 417 municipalities.
The magazine added 200 communities to its annual list this year — nearly doubling the number of places it looked at in 2016.
In Niagara, it meant Thorold, Pelham, Grimsby, Niagara-on-theLake, Lincoln, West Lincoln, Fort Erie and Port Colborne were added for the first time.
Niagara-on-the-Lake and Grimsby made the top 100, but St. Catharines moved from 139 in 2016 to 234. Niagara Falls slipped from 152 to 282 and Welland dropped from 177 to 320.
Sendzik said the rankings don’t appear to take into consideration St. Catharines’ new hospital, which he said means a higher level of care in terms of technology and access to new equipment, along with other new builds such as FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre and Meridian Centre.
“This is not a government thing, this is a community pride thing,” Sendzik said. “I can honestly say when I travel and go to different communities, I am challenged to find a community that has done so much in so little time to improve the livability of the community.”
He said the ranking doesn’t do justice to the amount of effort that was put in by both the previous city council, today’s city council and the people that were behind the building of the new hospital.
In response, he’s made six social media videos highlighting St. Catharines’ assets — such as Pathstone’s new Branscombe Mental Health Centre and Brock University’s Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts — which he’s been posting on Twitter and sending to MoneySense’s account.
“It’s not for the St. Catharines community because I think St. Catharines already knows how many amazing things that we have going on here. It’s for the larger community outside of St. Catharines,” he said.
“So really, the silver lining is that this allows us to go out and beat our chest a bit and say, hey you know what? You may have ranked us 234 but look at all the stuff that’s going on in our community.”
Mark Brown, senior editor at MoneySense, said St. Catharines’ ranking sounds like a big drop but in the scheme of things, the city really hasn’t moved in the rankings.
“The fact they’re at 234 really puts them in the middle of the pack in the country. They’re sort of at that 50th percentile right now. That’s exactly where they were last year,” he said.
Brown said the addition of 200 communities is the most ever added. In the past the magazine focused on the largest municipalities in the country but received calls from smaller communities asking why they weren’t part of the rankings. He said the magazine went out to find a more comprehensive list with a full data set so it could be collected in a uniform way to compile an expanded list.
The magazine’s rankings are based on data relating to the economy, taxes, home affordability, transit, crime, health accessibility, arts and community and more.
An online tool has been created this year so readers can build their own rankings based on what factors are important to them. They can give more weight to weather and less to transit options, for example.
“We do have our methodology, we stand by it, but we recognize some people have different priorities,” Brown said. “Maybe you don’t care about the weather. Maybe you don’t care about crime rates. Now you can go in and customize your list and see what works for you.”
Brown said municipalities can use the survey to see how they benchmark compared to their neighbours.
They can’t do anything about the weather, but they can use the ranking to look at other things such as the job market and how affordable their community is.
Niagara Falls Mayor Jim Diodati said the list left him with more questions than answers, such as what factors are weighted more than others to come up with the rankings.
But he said he always looks for lessons from communities doing better on the list and reaches out to people compiling rankings to help them “do a better survey” in the future.
Diodati said Niagara Falls has strengths that aren’t weighted in the survey and would have put the city head and shoulders above the rest.
“I’m sure every city thinks they’re unique, but Niagara Falls really is unique, in that sometimes we call it Canada’s biggest small town,” he said.
“We’re just a town of under 90,000 but we host 14 (million), 15 million people. We’ve got the amenities of a great big city but you’ve still got this small hometown feel.”
He said that means residents have greater access per capita to amenities such as entertainment, cross-border attractions, wineries, culinary options, fun social activities and trails for which no other Canadian city can be compared.
At the same time, Diodati said there is room for improvement in areas such as transit, housing and employment.
He said regional transit isn’t where it needs to be but they’re in the middle of an overhaul that includes municipal transit, GO train and the two airports.
He said he and Sendzik are pushing hard for more affordable housing and are working on long-term solutions.
And while employment was hit hard in the manufacturing sector, the region has attracted GE in Welland, is working to defend jobs at the casino and is bringing in new people with the promise of GO train.
Diodati said he doesn’t focus on surveys too much but they are always in his periphery.
“The people who like rankings are the ones that make the Top 10.”