Brandon plunges more than 50 spots in “Best Places to Live in Canada” rankings
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/06/2016 (3699 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
It is better to live in Whitehorse, YT than Brandon after the city plunged more than 50 spots in MoneySense’s annual "Best Places to Live in Canada" rankings.
After missing the Top 25 last year, had the Wheat City held onto its 2015 ranking of 26th overall, it would have ranked higher than Winnipeg, which dropped five spots to 29th this year. The city’s less than stellar rank is partly due to one of the magazine’s key metrics — unemployment.
Estimates from Economic Development Brandon show that unemployment in the city is continuing to trend upwards and estimates from last year have doubled in January, March and April of 2016.
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MoneySense estimates that the city’s unemployment rate may actually be as high as 10.2 per cent, based off of “trends in the job market economic region around each city over the past four years and then adjusted the National Household Survey (2011) unemployment data accordingly.”
Their figure would triple estimates from Economic Development Brandon, which listed the unemployment rate around 3 per cent in June 2015.
The magazine’s methodology gathers information on Census Metropolitan Areas, Census Agglomeration and Census Subdivisions defined by Statistics Canada and demographic data from Environics Analytics in addition to several other sources.
It awards a total of 103 points with varying weights across 20 categories, which includes population growth, median household income and weather. Four other Manitoba cities rounded out the bottom half of the list with Thompson (132nd), Portage (168th), Selkirk (169th) and Steinbach (170th).
Weyburn, Sask. was named the Best City to Live in the Prairies and Ottawa, Ont. was crowned best city to live overall. Some positives for Brandon included the city’s access to health care and ease of walking, bike or taking transit.
The magazine added eight cities and towns to their list in 2016, growing their rankings to a total of 219 cities.
History
Updated on Thursday, June 9, 2016 9:45 AM CDT: Updated to reflect that Whitehorse, YT sits at 81st place