The Economist doesn’t mess around.So much so that it has an entire ‘Intelligence Unit’ dedicated to global market scanning and forecasting.

And guess what, that unit says it’s a hell of a good time to be living in Vancouver.

In their August 2016 report, The Economist Intelligence Unit released “A Summary of the Liveability Ranking and Overview,” which is a fancy way of saying they broke down the best cities in the world to live.

And, thanks to a number of factors – not the least of which is the threat of terrorism – just six of the 140 cities considered in the report have actually moved up the rankings in the past year, while 29 have seen a negative change.

The overall rating of each city is arrived at through a ranking of more than 30 individual factors (both qualitative and quantitative) across five categories. The categories, and their weighting in the overall ranking rating between 1-100, is as follows:

Stability (weighted at 25% of total)

Healthcare (weighted at 20% of total)

Culture & Environment (weighted at 25% of total)

Education (weighted at 10% of total)

Infrastructure (weighted at 20% of total)

Of this year’s top 10 most livable cities, an astounding 70% are located in either Australia or Canada, with Vancouver just nudging out Toronto for 3rd spot, and Calgary tying for 5th with Adelaide, Australia. read more