Canada's top family-friendly cities

A new report card grades Canadian cities for family-friendliness

(Ottawa) – Today the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada is releasing Canada’s top family-friendly cities. This city report card is a comprehensive effort to measure where families thrive in Canada. Cities received grades in five main categories:

• Community feel
• Education choice
• Cost of living
• Economic strength
• Family independence

Included in the top five with an A overall are three bigger cities—Vancouver, British Columbia and Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta, but also the smaller but growing cities of Kitchener and Guelph in Ontario. Other cities had many outstanding points—shown by an A+ in our city report card. For example, Winnipeg has the lowest cost of living in the country and Ottawa-Gatineau has a lot of green space and high levels of charitable giving.  

At the bottom with a C grade signifying room for improvement were Saguenay and Trois-Rivières in Quebec; also Saint John, New Brunswick, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Thunder Bay, Ontario. No city in Canada received an F grade overall, however, some cities failed in a particular category. For example, Abbotsford-Mission in British Columbia has a very high homicide rate.

Some cities with an F however, overcame this to still come out on top. Oshawa, for example, received an F for long commute times, but emerged with an overall B+ grade. There are many cities clustered in the B or B+ range. “It’s fair to say that all Canadian cities are great places to live in international comparison,” say the study authors, Rebecca Walberg and Andrea Mrozek. “Within that context, the grades are an indication of places where the economy is even stronger, where there’s more population growth, lower taxes, lots of green space and lower commute times—the sorts of things that make it easier to thrive in a great community.”

For the top three in different regions and different sizes categories, a list of where cities excelled and where there is room for improvement, alongside a comprehensive explanation of each factor, please check the study online.

Canada’s top family-friendly cities can be read in full, here.

For additional information or comment, please contact: Andrea Mrozek at 613-875-5888 or Rebecca Walberg at 204-272-6165