Forget the scenery, says MoneySense, what did your house cost?

MoneySense magazine, in a bid to take the arbitrariness out of the ranking business, just sticks to the facts and, using them, has come up with a list of the best places to live in Canada. Now, nobody who comes low in such a rankings likes them much, but city life is so complex that it is difficult to see how avoiding subjectivity altogether results in a well-rounded result. Still, we give points to MoneySense for the spin of having the "fairest, most unbiased guide you can find to Canadian communities." As a promotional gimmick, this is calculated to get a lot of attention paid as media in the high-ranking cities trumpet the results and in the low-ranking scratch their heads.

The magazine calculates from a measurable but,it must be said, somewhat arbitrary basket of 16 hard numbers such as crime rates, housing prices, number of new cars, air quality, number of doctors, precipitation, number of days below 0 degrees and above 30 degrees and assigns points to each factor then ranks the result.

If you've got the mountains in the backyard and the ocean in front, well, scenery doesn't count.

By the magazine's criteria, this year, number one out of 154 measured cities is Ottawa-Carleton , followed by Victoria and Fredericton. Vancouver comes 10th. Ottawa comes first not by being excellent in any one category but cumulatively being OK in most of them.

Some cities are simply baffled about the results: Nanaimo, B.C. comes 84th. The mayor says drily: "We all know that Nanaimo is one of the greatest places on Earth to live, and we appreciate them keeping it a secret for us."