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Government jobs help Ottawa earn ‘Best place to live’ ranking

Above-average scores across the board make Ottawa tops overall in Moneysense rankings

Is Ottawa really the best place to live in Canada? That’s what the folks at MoneySense say.

Ottawa ranked first for the third year in a row in the magazine’s ranking of best places to live among 190 Canadian cities. Completing Moneysense’s top five best places to live in Canada are Burlington, Ont., Kingston, Ont., Halifax, N.S. and Regina, Sask.

According to Moneysense, Ottawa is not the top place in any of the categories taken into account for the ranking, but scores above-average marks in all of them. Ottawa is described as a place where “residents enjoy high household and discretionary incomes, thanks to the large number of well-paying government jobs, which insulate it from some of the vagaries of the economy.”

In other “most liveable” rankings though, Ottawa ranks behind Vancouver, which for MoneySense ranks a shabby 56th place in Canada. In the most recent Mercer Quality of Living Survey, Vancouver is 5th place in the world, and Ottawa the 14th, just ahead of Toronto. For The Economist’s Intelligence Unit, Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary are third, fourth and fifth place most liveable places in the world, but there’s no sign of Ottawa in the top spots of that list.

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