My criteria for best city in Canada has more to do with getting amazing Vietnamese food at 3 in the morning than health care, traffic and average income. But until I write that list of best cities (which we obviously top), we'll have to be content with 12th place.

We've been beaten out by Ottawa (yeah, sleepy Ottawa?) that placed first in a list of best places to live in Canada according to MoneySense magazine.

Despite not breaking the top ten, our ranking was pretty high for a city of our size. We lose out because of how big and populated we are - expensive housing and traffic just aren't major issues if you live in 7th place Moncton.

Where did we do well? On average, we get paid a lot more (we have the fifth highest income level in the country), but we loose out in unemployment and high housing prices. Keep in mind that this is coming from a business mag, so economic criteria like new cars and income were looked at (though weather, health care and traffic were also taken into consideration).

I am a complete urbanite, and the bigger the city the better. So I was surprised at the top 10 list, especially because I doubt I'd live in more than one or two of those places). Like a lot of people who choose to live here, I'm cool with trading the problems (traffic, noise, that weird guy sitting on the newspaper box) for that Vietnamese food at 3 in the morning.

See the whole list here.

photo: Image from myker from the blogTO flickr pool.