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

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 219^th 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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Libraries and hotels: Different sectors, but value-added information is a hot, proprietary commodity for both

In late 2006 and early 2007, I did some work in Trenton, Ontario for TeleTech Holdings Inc., an Englewood, Colorado-based company, as a high-speed Internet specialist offering technical support to their client, St. Louis-based Charter Communications, owned not by Bill Gates, but by Microsoft’s less famous co-founder, Paul Allen. The facility, which had just opened in May 2006 with more than 200 employees, had superb computers and desks and chairs, which ergonomically would put to shame any newsroom I’ve ever worked in.

Sadly, TeleTech closed that Trenton facility on Aug. 31, 2009, little more than two years after I arrived in Thompson, Manitoba. Why? “There is a change in the needs of the client. The work will be moved around to other centres,” TeleTech explained, adding the closure is “not a reflection” of quality of work completed at the Trenton centre. The closure came sandwiched somewhere between Outsourced, the 2006 romantic movie comedy, which won the best film award at the 2007 Seattle International Film Festival, and the one-season NBC sitcom by the same name that aired in 2010-11, telling the story of a fictional all-American company, Mid America Novelties of Seattle, outsourcing its call centre operation to Gharapuri in India.

Apparently newspapers aren’t the only type of business to go out of business. Or outsource their work to India. Although in the news biz it is more likely to be layout and production work, increasingly editing, and to a limited degree, at least so far, local reporting. The old real estate adage, “location, location, location,” which once seemed to apply to community newspapers, as much as your home, as where both were located was the most important factor in giving them value, in the case of papers for what was thought to be a unique commodity – local news – not so much anymore. Still, call me a Luddite, but it is hard to picture local council and school board meetings being covered remotely from 12 time zones away. Technically possible, yes; But likely on a wide scale? Probably not, although it has been done with some fairly unimpressive results to date.

Not long before I worked for TeleTech, I spent some time in 2005 and 2006 living in Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, both on the saltwater Tantramar marshes, and worked as a financial agent at Moneris Solutions in Sackville. I always marvelled at how I could walk into the lunchroom at Moneris in the remodeled red brick historic Atlantic Wholesalers building at 2 Charlotte Street, and pick up a hard copy of the Harvard Business Review off a shelf to read at lunch, or maybe chat over lunch with a fraud detection specialist about things like the language of a purchaser one of our merchants was dealing with half-way around the world being different from the primary language spoken in the location where the true IP is registered, etc., raising red flags for us. The other nice thing about both Moneris and TeleTech was they were “inbound” call centres – the client is calling you for help, as apposed to “outbound.” If you want to know the difference, ask a telemarketer.

My Moneris boss, Tom Rusted, had a M.Sc. in entomology, and was a black fly specialist, who in a career as a banker, had been involved in the pioneering rollout of mbanx in 1996 for Bank of Montreal, which was the first North America-wide virtual, full-service bank. Moneris Solutions, established in 2000, is a joint investment between RBC Royal Bank and BMO Bank of Montreal, and with more than three billion transactions a year from over 350,000 merchant locations, is Canada’s largest processor and acquirer of debit and credit card payments.

Moneris was a very different world than journalism, but not uninteresting by any means. I met a number of very bright and talented people at Moneris. Mind you, like the hotel industry where I devote my efforts now (along with the university library), Moneris is very much built on proprietary data – as much or even more so than the hotel business – and you couldn’t leave your computer without doing a “lock-and-walk.” Documents had to be turned facedown when you went away from your desk because there could be non-employee contractors or visitors in the building, although I can’t recall them letting many visitors in. Documents had to be paper shredded at the end of every shift. I remember not so long ago Googling the remodeled Moneris red brick historic Atlantic Wholesalers building at 2 Charlotte Street and no images came up for it! Sort of like Area 51 or Groom Lake, Nevada. My favourite story from that line of work was having a food and beverage manager from the Calgary Saddledome (now known as the Scotiabank Saddledome) call me at Moneris in Sackville because one of his concession clerks the night before at a Calgary Flames NHL hockey game had sold a fan a hotdog or something for $7 (in 2005-06) and the customer had paid by debit card.

The transaction had gone through not as $7 but $70,000 – immediately, of course, out of the customer’s bank account, courtesy of our Moneris point-of-sale (POS) hand-held terminal device.

Too many zeroes punched in, I guess. The manager was totally beside himself, desperate to refund the customer and credit his bank account before he found out about the mistake. It would have been a lot simpler, of course, if he had paid with a credit card, not a debit card, because you wouldn’t need the credit cardholder physically present with their card to do the refund, unlike a debit card. Although even a credit refund for $70,000 wouldn’t be that simple given the staggering sum.

I remember the manager asking me how it could possibly have been approved on our end and gone through and telling him presumably the customer had the $70,000 in the bank account linked to his debit card, and the bank had obviously not imposed a daily withdrawal limit for him, like most customer have. The poor manager said, “I’m not even sure I could get a mortgage right now for $70,000, much less buy something on my debit card for that amount.” I told him maybe do a quick refresher with his clerk on punching in numbers on the Moneris terminal keypad a bit more slowly. One of my favourite non-journalism true work stories.

Whether community newspapers can continue to monetize with much success their local information remains something of an open question, but much of the rest of the world is ever increasingly living on proprietary data and value-added information. For hotels, think cloud-based hotel property management systems.

But the phenomenon is, of course, much, much bigger than the for-profit private sector payment processing and hotel industries. Here at the university library, where we’re part of the institutional not-for-profit public sector, we’re also always dealing with proprietary information and data, albeit of a different type sometimes, in terms of copyright and intellectual property issues. Make no mistake; libraries monetize information. Want an inside-the-ballpark library term? Think GOBI3 (Global Online Bibliographic Information).

GOBI3 is an information source and bibliographic database that enables research libraries and consortia to have access to print and electronic titles.

A company called EBSCO, founded in 1944 and headquartered in Ipswich, Massachusetts, supplies a fee-based online research service with 375 full-text databases, a collection of 600,000-plus e-books, subject indexes, point-of-care medical references, and an array of historical digital archives. Last February, EBSCO bought Yankee Book Peddler, Inc. (YBP Library Services), located in Contoocook, New Hampshire, and founded in 1971 as a bookseller for academic libraries, providing books, collection management, and technical services in print and electronic formats to academic, research, and special libraries in the United States and internationally. There is also Midwest Library Service, out of Bridgeton, Missouri, a book jobber serving libraries since 1959.

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

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.

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