Best Places to Live

Thompson: Canada’s 337th Best Place to Live, MoneySense finds

Writing for the last nine years about MoneySense magazine’s closely watched annual survey, which ranks cities across the country from best to worst places to live in Canada – both overall and in specific categories –  used to be something of a rite of spring for me. How seriously it is taken, or should be taken, has always been a matter of some debate locally. Suffice to say though that in those early days before the survey went online, former mayor Tim Johnston and myself one year spent part of a day racing around town to Safeway and Shoppers Drug Mart to try and get our hands on newly-arrived hard copies in Thompson before going back to our respective offices to study the data for a few hours. That was followed by a late afternoon meeting and interview between us in the mayor’s office at City Hall, including a briefing, presumably mainly for my benefit, by Randy Patrick, then the city administrator. So it was taken seriously enough, so it seems.

Much has changed since 2008. MoneySense itself for instance. This year’s 14th annual survey is the first not to appear in a print edition of the magazine. That’s because there is no longer a print edition. MoneySense was previously published seven times a year by Rogers Publishing Limited, a division of Rogers Communications in Toronto. But Rogers decided last September to axe the print edition at the end of 2016 and continue publication with an online-only platform. No more needing to race around to Safeway or Shoppers Drug Mart to find a hard copy, although, truth be told, I’m not so sure I ever did once the survey went online. Multiply my choice by thousands of other readers and you get the idea what happened to the print edition.

The “Canada’s Best Places to Live” survey continues to grow in terms of the number of municipalities compared. And I mean grow. It has almost doubled in number this year from last year. There were 123 cities compared in 2007; jumping to 154 in 2008 and 2009; increasing again to 179 in 2010 and up to 180 in 2011, and then in increments of 10 to 190 in 2012, 200 in 2013, and then 201 in 2014, 209 in 2015, 219 in 2016, and now a whopping 417 in July 2017. It’s also no longer a rite of spring to write about. The release date for the survey has gradually been pushed back over the years until this year’s July 4 release places it well into early summer.

Thompson placed 132 out of 219 municipalities ranked in 2016 and 177th in 2015. In 2014, we finished in 121st place out of 209 cities ranked, while in 2013 we finished 164th out of 200 cities ranked. Thompson finished 103rd in 2012. We were 43rd in 2011, finished 58th in 2010, in 88th place overall in 2009, a year after the city’s highest ranking of 19th place overall a year earlier in 2008. Thompson ended up in 25th place in 2007.

This year we ranked 337th out of 417.

MoneySense estimated Thompson’s unemployment rate has increased significantly over the last year from 5.1 per cent to 9.98 per cent. And that’s before the closure of Birchtree Mine by Vale this coming October, to be followed by the smelter and refinery in 13 months from now, along with looming provincial public sector job cuts.

Thompson real estate, however, is another story. It continues, as it has historically, to follow its own made-in-Thompson laws of supply and demand, driven by market forces seemingly all its own. So while there may seem to be “For Sale” signs on about every fifth house on your street, and far fewer “Sold” signs, don’t let that fool you. The “average value of primary real estate” was pegged at $221,749 this year compared to $197,812 last year. Median household income was also up from $90,738 last year to $93,045 this year. To get around town, 0.3 per cent of us bike to work, the same percentage that takes public transit, MoneySense says.

While MoneySense says its survey is the most comprehensive data-driven snapshot of Canadian cities you’ll find anywhere, there is no apples-to-apples comparison possible between some of MoneySense’s rankings and say Statistics Canada data, although it is used in the survey. As MoneySense says, “We rank based on our own methodology.” If you want more details about that methodology, check out the link: http://www.moneysense.ca/save/canadas-best-places-to-live-2017-methodology/

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Economic Development, Future, Mining, Real Estate

What happens to boom-and-bust if there’s no upswing? Thompson heading into uncharted economic territory

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Thompson has been through tough times before. Pick a year: 1971 or 1977 or 1981 or 1999 perhaps. Take 1981 for instance. A “Hard Times” dance for striking Inco Steelworkers on Oct. 24, 1981 was packed to capacity. The Thompson Chamber of Commerce was in full panic mode as local merchants, along with striking miners, faced the prospect of a very bleak Christmas 1981. Numerous homes and businesses were boarded up. A dissident USW group was demanding a vote on Inco’s most recent offer (they got it and it was turned down). Nickel prices continued to slide, selling for just over $3 per pound, while worldwide demand had sagged 12 per cent below 1974 levels. The company was reporting a record third quarter loss of $US 29.4 million – its worst performance in 50 years. Canada and the rest of the world were sliding into a brutal recession. And so on.

Legends have made been made out of how resilient Northerners are and how Thompsonites persevered through the bad times until sunnier days dawned again. But that’s because a downturn in mining was always followed by an upswing, sooner or later. Boom-and-bust. Mining is a cyclical boom-and-bust business involving a finite resource, in this case nickel, which is eventually depleted. Thompson’s first mining bust came in 1971, scarcely a decade after the town was born, when Inco announced the closing of the Soab mines; Pipe Number 1 Mine was closed; and work was slowed down at the open pit as all production was cut and more than 200 jobs shed. By the end of 1971, Inco had laid off 30 per cent of its workforce here. “The Greens” on Nickel Road, part of the eight-building apartment complex made up also of “The Pinks” and “The Yellows,” as old-timers still sometimes call them, built by Malcolm Construction in the 1960s, wound up back in the hands of mortgagor Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and sat vacant for more than two years. Things improved in the mid-1970s but got tough again in both 1977 – with major job cuts at Inco – and again in 1981 with a bitter strike. But the good times always returned again to follow the bad. Just be patient and wait.

What if none of that is true this time? Does anyone seriously believe Vale’s Birchtree Mine, with about a couple of hundred jobs, is going to be open many years after the closure of the smelter and refinery next year and the 500 Vale jobs, give or take, about to disappear there one way or the other, as well as those of 250 to 375 contractors employed by the company.  The mine was previously on “care and maintenance” from 1977 to 1989.

What if there’s no bounce-back in mining?

While Vale’s $100-million-plus concentrate load-out facility and Dam B tailings expansion is welcome news looking toward the future of Vale’s Manitoba mining and milling operations here in Thompson, what if Vale’s proposed Thompson Foot Wall Deep Project, at the north end of Thompson Mine, previously known as Thompson (1D), with its 11 million tonnes of nickel mineralization, which forms a deep, north-plunging continuation of the Thompson deposit, doesn’t go ahead to help sustain the Thompson operation, given nickel is selling on the London Metal Exchange (LME) for US$4.96/lb. The refinery and smelter, which both opened March 25, 1961, are set to close next year and about 30 per cent of Vale’s production employees in Thompson work in the smelter and refinery.

Here’s a hint. Tourism, wolf or any other kind, is not going to save Thompson, if the goal is to maintain the city even at its current level of reduced economic vitality, much less return it to the glory nickel mining days of the 1960s. While hosting the 2018 Manitoba Winter Games next year will bring about 1,400 athletes and about 3,000 people overall – including coaches, officials and fans – into the city over an eight-day span, it is no long-term panacea for Thompson’s coming economic woes. Instead, it should hopefully be a nice one-time economic booster shot at a very welcome time.

Manitoba Chambers of Commerce president and CEO Chuck Davidson, who grew up in Northern Manitoba in both Flin Flon and Snow Lake, where he graduated high school, along with Opaskwayak Cree Nation Onekanew Chief Christian Sinclair, who co-chair the province’s Look North Task Force, which rolled out its new “Look North” website at http://www.looknorthmb.ca recently, both know that over the next two to three years about 1,000 jobs are going to disappear throughout Northern Manitoba, with a direct a loss of close to $100 million in annual income – and if you add-on a standard multiplier effect of three – an indirect loss of about $300 million is just around the corner.  Try triaging that with tourism.

I’m a local ratepayer and I work in both the private and public sectors in Thompson. I’ve lived here for a few months short of a decade. In the private sector, I work in the hotel industry, so I have a personal interest in seeing the tourism industry doing well in Thompson, and I do what I can for my part to facilitate that.  I also work in the post-secondary institutional public sector here as a public servant, so again, I very much want to see the people I serve every day do well. And while I think there are some good folks involved with both the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce provincially and the Thompson Chamber of Commerce locally, I’ve been around here long enough to remember ideas such as Barry Prentice’s airships to the arctic, which proposed using enormous cigar-shaped balloons, up to six storeys high, touted to offer cheap, reliable transportation for people and cargo, or Ernesto Sirolli, of Sacramento, California speaking to the local chamber, as the Italian-born founder of community economic development “enterprise facilitation.”

Sirolli developed the concept of enterprise facilitation more than three decades ago in Esperance, a small rural coastal community in Western Australia and now heads the Sirolli Institute in Sacramento. Esperance, an isolated coastal town of 8,500, had 500 people registered as unemployed in 1985, and a recent quota on fishing tuna that shrunk the local fishing industry.”Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!” Sirolli has famously said many times. “In 1975 I read Small is Beautiful by Ernest Schumacher. He was an economist who was critical of the Western approach to development in the Third World and he proposed a different approach known as ‘intermediate technology.’

“I was intrigued by his approach but what truly inspired me was something he wrote: ‘If people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone. This should be the first principle of aid,'” Sirolli said.

Tourism is often touted by politicians of various stripes as a fix-it for winding-down resource-based economies. But it just isn’t so. Tourism has some complementary economic role to play, more in Churchill than Thompson, but it will never replace high-value private sector mining jobs, such as exist at Vale’s above ground surface smelter and refinery operations, and underground at Birchtree Mine. Why is it so hard to say so out loud?

Same goes for the Thompson Economic Diversification Working Group (TEDWG), which was created in May 2011, six months after Vale announced the shutdown of the refinery and smelter in November 2010, and which has been lauded by what passes for thought leaders in Thompson as an example of how resource-based companies and the communities they operate in can work together to address the ramifications of changes in operations. “Unfortunately,” the Thompson Citizen rightly noted in a Feb. 8 editorial, “processes don’t mean much unless they achieve some tangible results and it’s difficult to see exactly what the time (and money, in Vale’s case) dedicated to the process has yielded so far.”

Vale paid out more than $2.5 million in cash to fund TEDWG, mainly using Toronto-based consultants rePlan, a Canadian firm with decades of experience helping resource-based companies and communities adapt to change. Within its first year, TEDWG had identified by the end of 2012 – more than four years ago now – five keys area of focus: a restorative justice facility, education and training, local and regional identity, housing, and economic development. Sirolli’s visit here in September 2013 came as local businesses stood at a crossroads as the implementation work coming out of TEDWG was supposed to begin.  Ask yourself where we are today with that agenda?

Prentice and Sirolli may well be visionaries, but well-meaning chambers of commerce folks? Not so much, I’m afraid.

Ask yourself about TEDWG right after you ponder for a few minutes whatever happened to the Thompson Community Development Corporation, better known as Thompson Unlimited, the city’s economic development corporation established in 2003 and disbanded last June by city council to be replaced by what? A City Hall operation to showcase Thompson’s rising taxes and water bills, along with falling housing prices and businesses closing?

Northern Manitoba needs much more than tourism. Lonely Planet, the world famous and largest travel guide on the planet, started by Tony and Maureen Wheeler more than 40 years ago, published an entry back in mid-2015 simply called “Introducing Thompson,” which can be found at: https://www.lonelyplanet.com/canada/thompson, and the result isn’t pretty. “Carved out of the boreal forest by mining interests in the 1950s, Thompson is a rather charmless town that travelers pass through en route to Churchill.”

True, two exceptions are named: “Thompson’s relatively new fame as ‘Wolf Capital of the World’ and a Boreal Discovery Centre that allows visitors to learn all about this predator, common in the wilderness around town, as well as other denizens of the boreal.” Well, the Thompson Zoo, which had opened in 1971, closed its doors going on five years ago now in the fall of 2012 and the resident animals decamped elsewhere. The future Boreal Discovery Centre on the site is, well, future. Lonely Planet is famous in its own words for telling travelers what a place is like “without fear or favor … we never compromise our opinions for commercial gain.”

Think of it this way. How many of us who now live in Thompson came to the city initially because we were drawn here by tourism of any kind? That’s what I thought. We came for a job and stayed for the job or jobs. Paint Lake, Pisew Falls and Sasagiu Rapids are nature’s bonuses, not the original draw here.

Along with Fodor’s and Frommer’s, Lonely Planet is one of the more respected and widely quoted travel guides in the world in what is a fairly crowded field.

Even Churchill, with its well established polar bear tourism, along with growing beluga whale and other eco-tourism, will be dead in the water if the Port of Churchill doesn’t get back to shipping something soon, and freight rail service is increased again. OmniTRAX, the Denver-based short line railroad, which owns the Port of Churchill, announced last July 25 it would be laying off or not re-hiring about 90 port workers, as it was cancelling the 2016 grain shipping season. At the time the cancellation was announced near the end of July, OmniTRAX did not have a single committed grain shipping contract. Normally, the Port of Churchill has a 14-week shipping season from July 15 to Oct. 31.

OmniTRAX bought most of Northern Manitoba’s rail track from The Pas to Churchill in 1997 from CN for $11 million. The track reached Churchill on March 29, 1929. The last spike, wrapped in tinfoil ripped from a packet of tobacco, was hammered in to mark completion of the project: an iron spike in silver ceremonial trappings. OmniTRAX took over the related Port of Churchill, which opened in 1929, when it acquired it from Canada Ports Corporation, for a token $10 soon after buying the rail line. The Port of Churchill has the largest fuel terminal in the Arctic and is North America’s only deep water Arctic seaport that offers a gateway between North America and Mexico, South America, Europe and the Middle East. OmniTRAX created Hudson Bay Railway in 1997, the same year it took over operation of the Port of Churchill. It operates 820 kilometres of track in Manitoba between The Pas and Churchill.

OmniTRAX had a terrible grain shipping season through Canada’s most northerly grain and oilseeds export terminal in 2015, moving only 184,600 tonnes as compared to 540,000 tonnes in 2014 and 640,000 tonnes in 2013.  In 1977 an all-time record 816,000 tonnes were shipped from the Port of Churchill. OmniTRAX is on a Canadian National (CN) interchange at The Pas and relies on CN for the grain-filled cars. OmniTRAX  considered 500,000 tonnes a normal shipping season. Wheat accounts for most of the grain loaded in Churchill, with some durum and canola also being shipped. In addition to grain and oil seeds, the shipping season has also included vessels loaded with re-supply shipments, such as petroleum products, northbound for Nunavut.

OmniTRAX moved between 2011 and 2014 to diversify the commodity mix the railway and port handle here in Manitoba in the wake of the federal government legislating the end of the Canadian Wheat Board’s grain monopoly, creating a new grain market. OmniTRAX said at the time transporting just grain would not be enough to sustain their Manitoba business over the longer term. The Canadian Wheat Board, renamed G3 Canada Ltd. by its new owners, has built a network of grain elevators, terminals and vessels that bypasses Churchill and uses the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence River and West Coast to move grain to foreign markets.

In 2013, worried about the viability of relying primarily on grain shipments through Churchill, OmniTRAX unveiled plans to ship Bakken and Western Intermediate sweet crude oil bound for markets in eastern North America and Western Europe on 80-tanker car Hudson Bay Railway trains from The Pas to Churchill and then from the Port of Churchill on Panamax-class tanker ships out Hudson Bay, the world’s largest seasonally ice-covered inland sea, stretching 1,500 kilometres at its widest extent, to markets in eastern North America and Western Europe.

However, the oil-by-rail to Churchill plan, unveiled in Thompson on Aug, 15, 2013, met a firestorm of public opposition, ranging from local citizens, members of First Nations aboriginal communities along the Bayline between Gillam and Churchill, with whistle stops in places like Bird, Sundance Amery, Charlebois, Weir River, Lawledge, Thibaudeau, Silcox, Herchmer, Kellett, O’Day, Back, McClintock, Cromarty, Belcher, Chesnaye, Lamprey, Bylot, Digges, Tidal and Fort Churchill, environmental activists, including the Wilderness Committee’s Manitoba Field Office, and even government officials – opposition fueled in part no doubt by the tragedy only 5½ weeks earlier at Lac-Mégantic, Québec where  a runaway Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway (MMA) freight train carrying crude oil from the Bakken shale gas formation in North Dakota – in 72 CTC-111A tanker cars – derailed in downtown Lac-Mégantic in Quebec’s Eastern Townships on July 6, 2013. Forty-seven people died as a result of the fiery explosion that followed the derailment.

Within a year, OmniTRAX shelved its oil-by-rail shipping plan from The Pas to Churchill in August 2014.

After more than a year of due diligence, OmniTRAX and the Mathias Colomb First Nation, Tataskweyak Cree Nation and the War Lake First Nation, known as the Missinippi Rail Consortium, signed a memorandum of understanding last December for the latter to buy OmniTRAX’s rail assets in Manitoba, along with the Port of Churchill, but the deal has not been completed to date, as the consortium looks for additional investors, and neither the provincial or federal governments are rushing for a seat at that table. Whatever other investors may be out there and how deep their pockets are remain to be seen. Just four days before the provincial election last April 19, OmniTRAX Canada filed a lawsuit on April 15, 2016 against the province, along with former NDP Premier Greg Selinger and former Thompson MLA and minister of infrastructure and transportation Steve Ashton, naming them as individual defendants, alleging they interfered in December 2015 in the sale of Hudson Bay Railway, a wholly-owned subsidiary of OmniTRAX Canada, to a consortium of 10 Northern Manitoba First Nations, led by Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, by disclosing confidential financial information about OmniTRAX Canada to consulting firm MNP LLP and Opaskwayak Cree Nation (OCN) at The Pas. That lawsuit remains outstanding.

As for the University College of the North (UCN), Northern Regional Health Authority (NRHA) and other provincial government departments and agencies in Northern Manitoba, they are are not going to offer economic salvation either.

While the public sector has some very good and well paid jobs and will continue to, the overall trend over the next several years is going to be away from growth and moving in the opposite direction toward job and budget cuts. The Pallister Tories have already told Helga Bryant’s NRHA to find about $6 million in savings in its $230-plus million annual budget. The province last month also announced it was scrapping for now at least a $9 million planned renovation of the Northern Consultation Clinic here in the basement of Thompson General Hospital. The clinic itself, which houses among other things, a number of resident and visiting medical specialties, who come through town on a rotating basis, sort of like a locum, remains open to see patients, often referred by a general or family practitioner.

“Barring a miracle, things in Thompson and in the north as a whole are not going to get better economically in the short term and it looks quite likely that they will actually get worse,” the Thompson Citizen observed editorially March 1. “What’s more, no white knight is going to ride in in the form of a company looking to employ lots of people in high-paying jobs that begin right away and last until the end of time.”

Every spring for the last 12 years, Toronto-based MoneySense magazine has published a closely watched annual survey, which ranks cities across the country from best to worst places to live in Canada – both overall and in specific categories. In the most recent survey, published last June in the summer issue of the magazine, Thompson got a nice bounce back up to 132nd spot in 2016 after its worst worst-ever finish in 177th place in 2015.

This year? Time will tell soon enough.

Same for Statistics Canada’s annual Juristat Crime Severity Index values, which will be released in July, for police services policing communities over 10,000 in population, with their Violent Crime Severity Index, Overall Crime Severity Index and Non-Violent Crime Severity Index values.

The crime severity indexes are calculated by assigning crimes different weights based on seriousness as measured by each crime’s incarceration rate and the average prison sentence courts mete out for each crime. The weighted offences are then added up and divided by population. The CSI is standardized to a base of 100 which is derived from the index values for the year 2006. While some of Thompson’s perennially high index numbers have improved marginally in recent years, the Violent Crime Severity Index did not, as we went from being fourth-highest in that category to third highest last year, behind North Battleford and Prince Albert in Northern Saskatchewan.

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Best Places to Live

Thompson gets a nice bounce up to 132nd spot in annual MoneySense survey released June 8 after its worst worst-ever finish in 177th place last year

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Every spring for the last 11 years, Toronto-based MoneySense magazine has published a closely watched annual survey, which ranks cities across the country from best to worst places to live in Canada – both overall and in specific categories.

In this year’s survey published nationally June 8 in the summer issue of the magazine, Thompson got a nice bounce back up to 132nd spot in 2016 after its worst worst-ever finish in 177th place last year. MoneySense also ranked eight more cities and towns this year, meaning the list has grown to 219 communities in its annual snapshot of Canada.

Thompson has a history of bouncing around, both up and down from year to year, in the numbers. In 2014, we finished in 121st place out of 209 cities ranked, while in 2013 finished 164th out of 200 cities ranked, it’s second-lowest ever ranking.

Ottawa, as well as Burlington and Oakville, also in Ontario, followed by St. Albert, Alberta, and Boucherville, Québec, finished one to five in that order in this year’s 2016 rankings for “Canada’s Best Places to Live.” Winnipeg slipped to 29th spot from 24th last year, while Brandon took a big dive down 82nd spot from 26th last year.  Brandon had finished 42nd in 2014 and 91st in 2013. Steinbach continued to tumble this year, ranked at 170 compared to 149 last year, after finishing in 85th spot in 2014 and 61st place in 2013. Portage la Prairie improved marginally to 168th place after finishing in 170th spot last year, compared to 144th in 2014, while Selkirk was in 169th place, down from 155th place last year.

Staying on top is a tough gig with the ever-fickle MoneySense. Last year, the magazine ranked Boucherville, Que., a suburb of Montreal, just across the St. Lawrence River with a population of 43,000, as the best place to live in Canada, after Boucherville had finished sixth overall in 2014.

“We’re seeing low unemployment, high incomes, affordable housing, [and] solid population growth, which are some of the key areas we look at, along with good access to transit and a vibrant arts community,” said Mark Brown, MoneySense reports and rankings editor in June 2015, explaining Boucherville’s topping the survey.

This year, Boucherville slipped back down to fifth place.

MoneySense is published seven times a year by Rogers Publishing Limited, a division of Rogers Communications in Toronto. The “Best Places to Live” survey continues to grow in terms of number of cities compared. There were 123 cities compared in 2007; jumping to 154 in 2008 and 2009; increasing again to 179 in 2010 and up to 180 in 2011, and then in increments of 10 to 190 in 2012, 200 in 2013, 201 in 2014 and 209 in 2015. Thompson finished 103rd in 2012. We were 43rd in 2011, finished 58th in 2010, in 88th place overall in 2009, a year after the city’s highest ranking of 19th place overall a year earlier in 2008. Thompson ended up in 25th place in 2007.

MoneySense estimated Thompson’s unemployment rate has decreased over the last year from 6.56 per cent to 5.1 per cent. “Average value of primary real estate” was pegged at $197,812 here this year. Median household income came in at $90,738, while average household discretionary income was calculated at $50,202.

MoneySense says its survey “is the most comprehensive data-driven snapshot of Canadian cities you’ll find anywhere.”  There are 35 separate categories being measured. They include factors such as household income, population growth, unemployment rate, cost of housing, crime rates, number of rainy days, number of doctors per 1,000 residents and the percentage of the population that walks, bikes or takes public transit to get to work.

Brown says, “While we can’t gauge many of the elements that people enjoy in their cities, the nearness of family, the friendliness of neighbours or even great sunsets, we have measured what can be measured and compared what can be compared from towns and cities across our provinces and territories.”

In 2014, Brown noted, “Critics of our best places ranking routinely point out that we don’t incorporate intangible considerations – like the best scenery or hottest attractions – into our methodology. It’s true, we don’t take any of these things into account. Out east, for example, the Nova Scotia community of New Glasgow doesn’t place highly on our ranking, despite being home to some of the finest river and deep-water fishing spots in the country.

“But such characteristics – no matter how appealing – aren’t the point of this exercise,” said Brown at the time. “This isn’t the best places to visit, it’s the best places to live. If you’re going to plant roots somewhere we think there should be good access to medical care, low crime, good public transportation and, yes, nice weather. Above all, the best places in Canada have to be affordable. That’s why measures like housing prices, employment and wealth are particularly important, and are given the greatest weighting in our methodology.”

In fact, New Glasgow was dead last in 219th place again this year in the MoneySense survey. That’s after being dead last year, finishing 209 out of 209. New Glasgow finished in 198th spot out of 201 places in 2014, after finishing 196th in 2013 out of 200 spots. It also finished last at 190 of 190 in 2012 and 180 out of 180 in 2011. In 2010, it managed to creep out of the cellar to rank 177th out of 179 after finishing dead last also in 2009 at 154th out of 154 places. In 2008, New Glasgow was 151 out of 154. The Census Agglomerate for New Glasgow includes New Glasgow, Stellarton, Trenton, Westville, Merigomish Harbour, Fisher’s Grant, Pictou Sub Division C and Pictou Subdivision. B.

You can check out the full 219 rankings in detail at: http://www.moneysense.ca/canadas-best-places-to-live-2016-full-ranking/

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Travel

Lonely Planet, the world-famous travel guide, calls Thompson a town lacking ‘charm’ but ‘a necessary evil for northern itineraries’

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Lonely Planet, the world famous and largest travel guide on the planet, started by Tony and Maureen Wheeler more than 40 years ago, has just published an entry simply called “Introducing Thompson,” which can be found at: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/canada/manitoba/thompson, and the result isn’t pretty. Lonely Planet is famous in its own words for telling travelers what a place is like “without fear or favor … we never compromise our opinions for commercial gain.”

Along with Fodor’s and Frommer’s, Lonely Planet is one of the more respected and widely quoted travel guides in the world in what is a fairly crowded field.

What Toronto-based MoneySense magazine did to Thompson last month through its selection of metrics, ranking Thompson 177th out of 209 cities in its best-to-worst places to live in Canada annual survey, released nationally June 1, Lonely Planet did this month in a few brief words.

The Thompson entry begins, “Carved out of the boreal forest by mining interests in the 1950s, Thompson is a necessary evil for northern itineraries. There’s no way around it, the town lacks charm although the boom in minerals means that it has 24-hour fast-food chains, a Wal-Mart and plenty of services.”

It goes onto note, “Thompson is the end of paved roads, and many people catch the lethargic VIA Rail Churchill train from here. The station, in an industrial area 1 km from town, is not a safe spot to leave your vehicle.”

Frankly, while it’s hardly flattering, having lived in Thompson for more than eight years, I find no substantive quibble with it. Which is why I was amused by a Facebook comment in response to a question, perhaps rhetorical, perhaps not, asking, “A hot tourist destination?” where another commenter responded, “Believe it or not we are. Maybe it’s time we look around and see what others see. There are more positives than negatives.”

OK then. Did we read the same article? “Look around and see what others see?” Didn’t Lonely Planet just describe Thompson, Manitoba as a “necessary evil for northern itineraries” and lacking in charm, where it is unsafe to park your vehicle by the train station while travelling to Churchill, although McCreedy Campground  and the Heritage North Museum (“in a small log-cabin stuffed with stuffed local wildlife and history. It has tourist info”) fared marginally better.

If it’s any consolation, Lonely Planet also had some unflattering things to say about places in Ontario like Wawa, Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie and North Bay.

“Let’s face it, Sault Ste-Marie is not the prettiest town. In many parts, it’s dreary. Downtown feels like a ghost town and can be sketchy after dark,” that review says.

Or Wawa:  “In the middle of nowhere, enduring winters straight out of a Siberian nightmare, little Wawa is a tough bird.”

As for North Bay, it “bills itself as ‘just north enough to be perfect,’ which begs the question: Perfect for what? It’s just north enough to make visiting Torontonians feel like adventurers, and the lakeshore is lovely, but other parts of town have seen better days.”

In an e-mail statement to CBC News, Lonely Planet said, “If our coverage promotes tourist boards to lift their game a little and improve services in a town and inspire their businesses to lift their game, then I think we’re doing a great job.”

Sudbury fares a bit better in its review, getting some credit for “making something out of nothing  … locals have planted over 12 million trees since 1980, although heavy industry and mining still rule. Sudbury has a university, two fantastic science museums, some cool haunts and chilled locals, but there’s little reason to visit unless you’re passing through.”

Also found in the Lonely Planet entry for Thompson is the somewhat understated, “Centrally located, Interior Inn is typical of the raw-edged motels that abound in town.” Raw-edged motels? I imagine there’s a Jeff Mcinnes column waiting to be written on that.

But the problem is less in Lonely Planet’s descriptors for Thompson, I think, than the fact is that every time this kind of piece appears, or is recycled on Facebook or other social media, it typically triggers three stages of collective local response: Ignore it and hope it goes away (it doesn’t, people everywhere read this stuff about Thompson, as they do other places written about in travel guides and best-of-guides … surprise!); followed by trying to spin the unspinnable into a positive, which lacks all credibility; and then when strategy one and two fail, shoot the messenger (if it’s a Toronto or Melbourne, Australia-based publication, even better).

Every spring for the last 10 years, Toronto-based MoneySense magazine has published a closely watched annual survey, which ranks cities across the country from best to worst places to live in Canada – both overall and in specific categories. In this year’s survey, Thompson tumbled in its worst-ever finish to 177th place from 121st place last year out of 209 cities ranked in 2015 in the annual MoneySense snapshot of Canada. Thompson’s previous lowest placing in the survey was in 2013 when it finished 164th out of 200 cities ranked.

Do rankings or reviews like Lonely Planet and MoneySense really matter? Yes and no, but less so than the foolishness of lashing out reactively against them, burying one’s head in the sand and going into denial about them or just wishing it wasn’t so.

Former Mayor Tim Johnston, in commenting for annual MoneySense rankings stories on Thompson, used to say somewhat philosophically “it is what it is.” While the then mayor was interested in seeing the annual survey results, one got the impression he wasn’t losing any sleep over whether Thompson was up or down in a given year.

Me, I’m OK with how reviews like Lonely Planet or surveys like MoneySense play out, and feel no need to sugarcoat them or spin them – or go into denial about them.  After all, metrics are not everything. I was fishing on the dock again at Paint Lake yesterday at sunset on a pleasant mid-July evening, while enjoying a Popeye’s burger and fries. On the way home, I saw the first wolf I have seen from the bush here, near Ospwagan Lake, crossing Highway 6 from west-to-east just after 9 p.m.

Metrics are not synonymous with quality of life necessarily.

But a bookstore would be nice. But home is also where the heart is.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

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Best Places to Live

Thompson tumbles in worst-ever finish: Drops from 121st to 177th place out of 209 cities ranked in annual MoneySense survey released June 1

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Every spring for the last 10 years, Toronto-based MoneySense magazine has published a closely watched annual survey, which ranks cities across the country from best to worst places to live in Canada – both overall and in specific categories.

In this year’s survey published nationally today, Thompson tumbled in its worst-ever finish to 177th place from 121st place last year out of 209 cities ranked in 2015 in the annual MoneySense snapshot of Canada. Thompson’s previous lowest placing in the survey was in 2013 when it finished 164th out of 200 cities ranked.

Last year, Thompson moved up from 164th to 121st place. In this year’s MoneySense “Canada’s Best Places to Live’ ranking, Thompson was one of six Manitoba cities included in the survey. Winnipeg was 24th on this year’s list of 209 Canadian cities, down from its 19th place ranking last year, 16th spot in 2013 and 10th place finish in 2012. Brandon continued to gain ground in this year’s MoneySense rankings, moving up to 26th place from 42nd last year and 91st in 2013. Steinbach also took a big tumble this year, ranked at 149, compared 85th spot last year and 61st place in 2013. Portage la Prairie dropped to  170th spot from 144th place last year; it finished in 160th place in 2013. Selkirk was 155th.

The magazine ranked Boucherville, Que., a suburb of Montreal,  just across the St. Lawrence River with a population of 43,000, as the best place to live in Canada. Boucherville had finished sixth overall last year. “We’re seeing low unemployment, high incomes, affordable housing, [and] solid population growth, which are some of the key areas we look at, along with good access to transit and a vibrant arts community,” said Mark Brown, MoneySense reports and rankings editor, in explaining Boucherville’s topping the survey

MoneySense is published seven times a year by Rogers Publishing Limited, a division of Rogers Communications in Toronto. The “Best Places to Live” survey continues to grow in terms of number of cities compared. There were 123 cities compared in 2007; jumping to 154 in 2008 and 2009; increasing again to 179 in 2010 and up to 180 in 2011, and then in increments of 10 to 190 in 2012, 200 in 2013, 201 in 2014 and 209 in 2015. Thompson finished 103rd in 2012. We were 43rd in 2011, finished 58th in 2010, in 88th place overall in 2009, a year after the city’s highest ranking of 19th place overall a year earlier in 2008. Thompson ended up in 25th place in 2007.

MoneySense estimated Thompson’s unemployment rate has increased over the last year from 5.5 per cent to 6.56 per cent.

While 10.9 per cent of Thompson residents travel to work by walking only the most miniscule numbers commute to work by bicycling or using public transit, MoneySense found. In the case of bicycling, only 0.7 per cent of Thompson residents bicycle to work, while even fewer – 0.3 per cent – use public transit to travel to work.

MoneySense says its survey “is the most comprehensive data-driven snapshot of Canadian cities you’ll find anywhere.”  There are 34 separate categories being measured. They include factors such as household income, population growth, unemployment rate, cost of housing, crime rates, number of rainy days, number of doctors per 1,000 residents and the percentage of the population that walks, bikes or takes public transit to get to work.

Brown says, “To identify the Best Places to Live in Canada we rank each community across 34 separate categories to get a detailed picture of what life is like in each community.”

Last year, Brown noted, “Critics of our best places ranking routinely point out that we don’t incorporate intangible considerations – like the best scenery or hottest attractions – into our methodology. It’s true, we don’t take any of these things into account. Out east, for example, the Nova Scotia community of New Glasgow doesn’t place highly on our ranking, despite being home to some of the finest river and deep-water fishing spots in the country.

“But such characteristics –  no matter how appealing – aren’t the point of this exercise,” says Brown. “This isn’t the best places to visit, it’s the best places to live. If you’re going to plant roots somewhere we think there should be good access to medical care, low crime, good public transportation and, yes, nice weather. Above all, the best places in Canada have to be affordable. That’s why measures like housing prices, employment and wealth are particularly important, and are given the greatest weighting in our methodology.”

In fact, New Glasgow was dead last in 209th place this year. New Glasgow finished in 198th spot out of 201 places last year, after finishing 196th in 2013 out of 200 spots. It also finished last at 190 of 190 in 2012 and 180 out of 180 in 2011. In 2010, it managed to creep out of the cellar to rank 177th out of 179 after finishing dead last also in 2009 at 154th out of 154 places. In 2008, New Glasgow was 151 out of 154. The Census Agglomerate for New Glasgow includes New Glasgow, Stellarton, Trenton, Westville, Merigomish Harbour, Fisher’s Grant, Pictou Sub Division C and Pictou Subdivision. B.

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