Despite rising costs and the ascent of the loonie, our cities still have advantages. We rank the Top 40 cities to do business in our annual guide, and offer an in-depth look at 3 cities — Kitchener-Waterloo, Abbotsford and Vaughan — and Canada's decaying infrastructure.

The 40 cities we included in our survey of Canada's Best Places To Do Business include the country's 25 largest municipalities, according to the 2006 census, plus 15 smaller centres to provide regional representation. We ranked these places on 5 factors reflecting socio-economic health: operating cost, cost of living, building permit growth, unemployment rate and crime rate. Read our methodology for the details on each factor and how we weighted them.

How to use these tables

The tables can be sorted in ascending and descending order by clicking on the name of the column of interest. Clicking on a community name loads a profile page with all of our information about that community.

Sections of The Best Places to Do Business ranking can be emailed, printed out in a printer-friendly format, or downloaded into a spreadsheet.

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