Vancouver left off list of best cities

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Maybe Vancouver isn’t so “liveable” after all.

We’ve always come out near the top of the list of the best places to live, but not today; new rankings, based on data from The Economist, dropped Vancouver from the list entirely.

It’s not because we’ve done anything bad, though. The people who drew up the list are rating cities using new criteria. We’re still waiting to hear back from The Economist on exactly what this new criteria is.

We aren’t the only city to get the boot from the list of 70 cities. Melbourne and Vienna, perennial favourites, were dropped as well.

The only Canadian city to make the list is Toronto, cracking the top 10 at number 8. The research says Toronto would be an adequate proxy for Vancouver, despite being different cities over 3,300 kilometres apart.

Hong Kong is number 1.

Stephen Pearce with Tourism Vancouver says the livability list is causing some controversy, “I think The Economist is taking a lot of heat from people who are looking at this. Not only is this compromising the survey done on an annual basis and are continuing to do, but you didn’t invite the folks who are normally at the top of this list.”

The list used different factors compared with previous Economist rankings. It was made through a competition which asked people to come up with their own livability index.  It just happened that this particular one did not include Vancouver.

“It’s unfortunate that this time they chose not to include us,” adds Pearce. “Hopefully they will revisit that next year. I know that we’d like to be involved in any comparison where they’re looking at quality of life between one city and another. I think, under scrutiny, we’d stand up pretty well.”

David Eaves, one of the judges of the competition to find the new livability index, helped pick the Vancouver-less list.”As a judge, I loved [the winner’s] visualization but more importantly, the way he included environmental information as part of his ranking – something the current list does not do as effectively.”

“As a Vancouverite, I suspect that Vancouver would probably do even better by the new criteria since we posses a number of ‘green assets,'” explains Eaves. “So it would be interesting for someone to assess Vancouver using [the new] criteria – I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up being positioned still higher up than we appear on the traditional list.”