With Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto all ranked in the top 10 of the Global Liveability Index 2023, we speak to residents in each city to find out what makes life so sweet.
Calgary is the only one with a decent cost of living. You can get a single detached for 400k. You can buy an apartment starting at 120k. Not unreasonable
Oh yeah, Vancouver really gives northern Siberia a run for its money during the winter. Human beings just aren’t built to survive one or two days of snow every couple years. Best you stay far away and live somewhere pleasant, like rural Texas.
I live about 30 mins from vancouver in the US, and winter in this region really isn't that bad. I could see it for the other cities, but in this region we have years where it doesn't even snow at all. The last "bad winter" we had was about 2 years ago, and before that maybe 5 years ago?
Vancouver resident here. A great deal of the city of Vancouver and surrounding Lower Mainland are suburbs. The mixed-zoned areas tend to be some of the most expensive and have been gentrified to hell or are in the process of doing so.
Vancouver also has some of the worst traffic in Canada (and North America, if I remember right) and most of the buses here get stuck in gridlock traffic and are frequently late. Our passenger train system, the SkyTrain, is our best option but it is limited in where it has stations and Vancouver's immense wealth disparity and poor treatment of homeless often leaves the SkyTrain in a state of filth or feeling unsafe.
I've lived here all my life and will likely have to leave soon. Vancouver is not a livable city by any means; it's one of the most expensive places to live in North America. This is a very beautiful city with many amazing places to see and visit but it has a lot of darkness and suffering under that thin surface and less than nothing is being done about it. For every beautiful tourist destination there are numerous streets full of homeless camps, littered with feces, and drug addicts stumbling around without any help.
I've deleted and redrafted this several times now... but am I unreasonable for being weirded out and a bit offended by how out of touch rich-and-powerful-people journalism is? Canada, like Australia, is soaked in blood. This is just public image laundry for a country with the same genocide cops and resource extraction monstrosities as all the other colonies, and I'm guessing most of the people reading a niche link aggregator aren't really the target audience.
If things like this are going to try and memory hole the crimes of a state, we should conscientiously memory hole crappy fluff pieces like this. Who's moving to Canada? Who has the ability to initiate infrastructure projects or run funding requests up the political ladder?
If nothing else, just as a personal request. I just spent a long time trying to stay calm and articulate (or relative to my original state upon reading this) because this really made my blood boil.