W
hether you work to live or live
to work, the place you set down
roots matters. And the real-
ity is, some cities are superior
when considering not only your
job but also your job market. How are your
neighbours faring? If not so well, could that
be you tomorrow?
We knew that ranking B.C.'s cities on the
quality of their job markets would be a con-
troversial exercise—one that required hard
data. For that we reached out to Environics
Analytics, a Toronto-based analytics firm
that compiles data from sources like Statis-
tics Canada on hundreds of cities across the
country. We created, tweaked, debated and
ultimately settled on a methodology, weigh-
ing certain criteria, like income growth,
more heavily than, say, unemployment (a full
accounting on p.55).
And what we found was a pattern: the cit-
ies with higher incomes also tended to have
the lowest unemployment. They tended
to have growing populations. In short, no
matter how we sliced the data, our ranking
remained relatively unchanged. Metro Van-
couver dominated the top of the list alongside
boom towns Fort St. John and Dawson Creek.
On the other end: cities like Prince Rupert
and Terrace, whose fishing and forestry
industries have lumbered through a decade
of decline. Yet even there, at the centre of a
hoped-for
LNG boom, the fortunes of those
northwestern cities—and their positions on
our list—could shift dramatically in the years
to come.
In the meantime, we believe this first-
ever ranking serves as a valuable big-picture
snapshot of B.C.'s job market as it stands. We
hope you find the Best Cities list useful and
informative—but if not, send us a note at bcb@
canadawide.com.
January 2015 BCBusiness 41 bcbusiness.ca
Best
Cities
for
Work
Home is where
the heart is—but a
good paycheque
doesn't hurt. We
gathered data on
36 cities through-
out the province,
ranking them
according to their
job markets
i l l u s t r a t i o n s b y
M a t t h e w B i l l i n g t o n
in b.c.
e x C l u s i v e B C B u s i n e s s s u r v e y
