Canada’s top weather in Thorold
According to MoneySense magazine it is
Where’s the best weather in all of Canada? Out on the West Coast? The Maritimes? Try Thorold. The Niagara city “where ships climb the mountain” has been ranked No. 1 for best weather in Canada by MoneySense magazine.
The magazine said based on data from 417 cities, Thorold was tops for being often sunny and having the ideal amount of rain.
Thorold Mayor Ted Luciani agrees based on his own backyard data.
“My vegetable garden is exploding. It must be the weather. It can’t be me.”
Luciani said last winter was easy in Thorold as it doesn’t get heavy storms like communities along the lakes. And this past weekend’s weather was great for Canada Day festivities, with 2,500 people in Battle of Beaverdams Park for bands and a fireworks finale.
“We seem to be in a sweet spot here in the peninsula.”
The magazine released a top 100 online list of best weather spots at www.moneysense.ca. Second to Thorold was Toronto, followed by Oakville, Uxbridge and Mississauga.
Niagara did well temperaturewise overall. Pelham ranked 11th in the country, Niagara-on-the-Lake 13th and St. Catharines 15th.
With several big developments underway in Thorold, Luciani said the weather ranking can only help boost the city.
“I’ll definitely brag about it. It’s really good news.”
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 communities it looked at in 2016.
In Niagara, it meant Thorold, Pelham, Grimsby, Niagara-on-the-Lake, 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 moved from 152 to 282 and Welland dropped to 320 from 177.
“This is not a government thing, this is a community pride thing,” he 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 liveability of the community,” Sendzik said.
Sendzik said the rankings don’t appear to take into consideration the city’s 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 First-Ontario Performing Arts Centre and Meridian Centre.
He said it 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 which he’s been posting and sending to MoneySense on Twitter.
“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 and compiled the larger 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 readerscan 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. 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 look at 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 people who like rankings are the ones that make the top 10.
The list left him with more questions than answers, he said, such as what factors are being weighted more than others.
But he said he always looks for lessons from communities doing better in the rankings and reaches out to people doing the surveys to help them “do a better survey.”
Diodati said Niagara Falls has strengths that aren’t weighted in the survey and would have put it 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.