Canada's smartest cities | Macleans.ca - Canada

Canada's smartest cities

Is your city holding you back or is it helping you thrive?

CATHY GULLI | August 27, 2008 |

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If you were to imagine Canada's smartest city — a place filled with fascinating people, cultural delights and endless learning opportunities — what would it be like?

It would probably be a smallish community, suggests Bert Sperling, an internationally recognized expert on cities and founder of Sperling's Best Places, which ranks municipalities for ideal living conditions. And it would be centred around a university, or maybe a government institution. You could work in academics, at a think tank, as a high-earning public servant, or you might start your own business catering to all the over-achieving folks in town. There would be a sense of community, and on weekends you and your friends could spend hours at free museums and art galleries, where people from different parts of the world would converge in scholarly appreciation. It would be a city that's "rich in culture," Sperling says.

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Chances are, few of us can claim to live in such an enlightened utopia. But a recent study by the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), an Ottawa-based non-profit corporation that promotes all kinds of learning, shows that some Canadian cities come close. The CCL ranked more than 4,700 communities across the country to find out which ones have the most education opportunities, and they looked way beyond what's happening inside the classroom. They included such wide-ranging indicators as workplace training, volunteerism and even visits to the museum. Paul Cappon, president of the CCL, first came up with the idea of the index when he worked at the Council of Ministers of Education in Canada and wanted to find out more about lifelong learning. "We already measure schools very well using standardized testing," he says, but "we know that is only a small part of learning. We need to measure what happens outside the school too."

The CCL's annual Composite Learning Index, now in its third year, is created with data from 25 indicators, which in turn are grouped into four "pillars" of learning, originally developed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The "learning to know" pillar focuses on formal education. It includes university attainment, high-school dropout rates, the proportion of youth who pursue post-secondary studies, and the math, science, reading and problem solving scores of teenagers. "Learning to do," the second pillar, focuses on applied skills. It looks at the number of local vocational schools and the proportion of employees who have access to workplace training. The "learning to live together" pillar attempts to measure the social values in a community. It looks at things like the proportion of Canadians who volunteer, as well as participation in clubs, and the percentage who socialize with other cultures. The last pillar, the "learning to be" pillar, looks at cultural opportunities, and includes spending on books, museums, the arts, sports and recreation, as well as access to cultural resources.

How your city scores could have a big impact on your life. For starters, if your city ranks higher, "you'll make more money," says Kevin Stolarick, research director of the Martin Prosperity Institute in Toronto, who studies communities and worked on the forthcoming Canadian edition of Who's Your City? with demographer Richard Florida. "You will become a more skilled, educated and talented individual, and that's going to be reflected in the money you make." Adds Dale Kirby, education professor at Memorial University in St. John's, "we've seen consistently from the OECD that if you have a higher level of education among a population you're going to be doing reasonably well economically."

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