Maclean's uses a variety of factors to calculate which communities are the best to live in throughout the country. (Submitted/Maclean's)

By Glenn Hicks

comparing communities

P.A. rated poorly in community ranking

Aug 9, 2019 | 2:20 PM

Prince Albert is near the bottom of the list in Maclean’s Magazine’s annual look at Canada’s Best Communities. The city is ranked at 371 out of 415.

Responding to the report, some officials in the city suggested the numbers were misleading.

Canada’s cities and towns were ranked across a spectrum of categories. paNOW has added – in brackets – some of the criteria and sub-categories associated with those main categories: wealth (median household income) and economy (adding full-time jobs), affordability (discretionary income and cost of housing or rent), population growth (over 5 years), taxes (as a percentage of income), commute (walkability and transit options), crime (5-year-average), weather, access to health care (amount of doctors and hospital wait times), amenities (higher education campuses) and culture ( how many people working in arts and recreation). Maclean’s said Environics Analytics provided a significant amount of data about each community.

Weyburn was rated the best community in Saskatchewan and the report’s ‘Prairies region’ and 45th overall in the nation. Regina and Saskatoon were rated at 74th and 83rd respectively. Burlington, Ontario was rated as the best place to live in the nation.

Prince Albert’s top three features were its access to health care, housing affordability and population growth.

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P.A. mayor Greg Dionne was not able to comment Friday as he had not had the chance to read the report in full.

However, having looked deeper into the rankings, Elise Hildebrandt, the CEO of the P.A. and District Chamber of Commerce thought the city performed well regarding health care.

“It says we have a lot of doctor’s offices, so if you’re an older person living in our community I take that as a reassurance that you can get health care …very easily,” she said. Hildebrandt also noted other communities in the rankings – one with 14,000 people for example – had only three doctor’s offices when P.A. had a hundred. “That’s pretty awesome,” she said.

As for the wider impression given by P.A.’s ranking of 371, Hildebrandt said what is often portrayed about the community wasn’t always the truth and she found from her experience that the downtown was very safe. She also questioned the average house price given in the rankings for P.A. which was above $400,000. Latest figures from the Saskatoon Region Association of Realtors put that number in the low $200,000’s.

In its ranking methodology the magazine put much of its scoring weight on wealth, the economy and affordability. Weather, health and commute were not weighted as highly, and the fewest ranking points were given in areas like crime, taxes, population growth, culture and community, and amenities.

The publication offers an online tool that allows users to increase the weight they give for certain categories they may feel are more important to them. When the maximum weighting is given to health care and taxes Prince Albert’s ranking re-adjusts to around 160 out of the 415 communities. Across the nation there are almost 1,600 communities officially registered with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, 348 of them in Saskatchewan.

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glenn.hicks@jpbg.ca

On Twitter:@princealbertnow