Alex Beckett grew up in Saint John, N.B., and in his early 20s left the East Coast to attend graduate school in Toronto. He liked the hubbub of the big city and, after graduation, he built a thriving career as a web master and editor. He and his wife Jo, a Halifax girl, bought a house in an up-and-coming Toronto neighborhood and settled down to raise a family. But after their second daughter was born, the Becketts began to experience the oddest sensation — a distinct yearning to return to their Maritime roots. Alex knew that work in his field would not be as easy to find as in Toronto, but both he and Jo pined for a less hectic life and the smell of salt air.

Four years ago, the Becketts finally decided to act on their yearnings. They cashed out of a booming Toronto real estate market and moved to a dream house on the south shore of Nova Scotia, about 45 minutes down the road from Halifax. As the Becketts hoped, the move brought them closer to family. They loved the sense of space and constant presence of the ocean, not to mention the lower real estate prices and relaxed pace of life. But Atlantic Canada wasn't all bliss — among other things, the call for Internet expertise on the East Coast was even less than Alex's modest expectations had foreseen. "I don't think I ever doubted our move," he says, "but I realized that I had underestimated some of the economic differences between what I had grown used to in Toronto and what I was experiencing on the East Coast." If, like the Becketts, you've ever wondered about picking up and moving, you've probably pondered what makes a community a good place to live. Is it climate? Salaries? Real estate?

To be honest, it's probably a bit of each of those factors, plus many more. Our third annual list of Canada's Best Places to Live is designed to help you measure as many different aspects of a community as possible. You can use our findings in several ways. Perhaps you're planning to relocate. Perhaps you're looking to invest in real estate. Maybe you simply want to know how your community stacks up against its neighbors. Whatever your situation, we've got the facts you need.

Canada's best places to live

We've taken weather into account, of course. Jobs and home prices, too. We've also looked at crime, the availability of doctors, how easy it is to walk or bike to work, and more than a dozen other factors.

Unlike most listings of best cities, our ratings aren't about who has the best scenery, or the best restaurants, or the best beaches. Instead, we've tried to suss out the factors — many of them quiet and unobtrusive — that make a community a good place to live. Where a city ends up on our list is not based upon judges' opinions or popularity polls. It's based on hard numbers. That means our Best Places to Live rankings are the fairest, most unbiased guide you can find to Canadian communities.

This year, we're delighted to provide you with information on 154 communities, up from 123 last year. Thanks to improved sources of data, we are now able to break out metropolitan areas into separate listings for communities of 100,000 or more. So while we previously had to rank all the various communities within the Greater Toronto Area as one unit, we can now separately rate locales such as Mississauga, Markham and Oakville that used to be lumped together under the Toronto label. Similarly, we can break Vancouver down into separate entries for the City of Vancouver, Burnaby, Surrey and other surrounding communities.

To make our listings as useful as possible, we've acted on your suggestions and included additional factors, such as air quality, in our rankings. In all, we looked at 16 indicators for each community. The maximum number of points a community could earn was 104. Here's how we divvied things up.

California dreamin'. The first factor we examined was weather. No surprise there — this is Canada, after all, where summer lasts barely longer than a beer commercial. Weather is our national obsession.

We awarded each city up to 20 points based upon how closely its climate resembled our fantasy — a pristine, unpolluted paradise with mild Mediterranean or Californian temperatures. No place in Canada is likely to be mistaken for Cannes or San Diego, but we assumed that most people prefer dry and moderate to wet and cold. So we began by handing out points for balmy weather — the fewer days below zero, the better. We awarded extra points to places with lots of sunny days. We penalized communities that get showered with rain or blanketed with snow. In years past, we took away points from communities with lots of sweltering days over 30 degrees. Based upon your feedback, we decided to drop that penalty this year. (It seems that many of you think the hotter, the better — and after this past winter, we're inclined to agree.) We added an entirely new category for air quality and looked at both ozone levels and particulate matter to arrive at a rating for each community's breathing supply.

Real estate, real cheap. It's lovely to be able to bask in warm, sunny weather, but it's even nicer if you can do so in your own backyard. In many of Canada's fair-weather locations, real estate costs are suffocating. Is Victoria's mild climate really worth the $500,000 or more that it would take you to buy a three-bedroom bungalow there? To enthusiastic gardeners, perhaps. But to others, the strain of shouldering a huge mortgage simply isn't worth the stress.

To make our listing as realistic as possible, we put ourselves in the position of someone moving to a city and struggling to buy a house. We awarded up to 15 points for affordable housing. Half these points we handed out for low home prices. But since local salary levels vary widely, we fine-tuned our home-affordability ratings by awarding additional points based upon how many years of the average local salary it would take to buy a typical home in each city. Based purely on affordability, it appears that you should immediately move to Yorkton, Sask. Yep, winters may be a tad chilly there, but a typical resident can buy a home for less than two years' salary. In contrast, you would have to bank 7.5 years of the average local salary to buy a house in balmy Vancouver.

Paycheques, please. This is where we venture into territory that most listings of best cities tend to ignore. Simply put, we place a lot of emphasis on how much cash is in people's pockets. We believe prosperous communities tend to be pleasant communities. At the very least, prosperous towns tend to be better places to live than neighborhoods where poverty is hammering at the door. We distributed up to 25 points based upon prosperity indicators. We started by handing out points based upon average household incomes in each community. But big bucks by themselves weren't enough to earn a top score on our prosperity chart. In some of Canada's most well-paid communities, such as the oil boomtown of Fort McMurray, six-figure paycheques are as common as Timbits, but living expenses loom equally large. A huge salary doesn't mean much if you have to pay $400,000 for a townhouse or $100 for a bag of groceries. So we awarded additional points for people's discretionary income — in other words, what proportion of their paycheques they have left at the end of every month after all the bills are paid. It turns out that people in middle-class communities such as Estevan, Sask., and Whitby, Ont., get to keep far more of their paycheques than people in apparently much more prosperous communities such as Vancouver or Toronto.