

Chris Herhalt, CP24.com





The City of Toronto is fourth on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual list of most “liveable” cities once again in 2016, a spot it has held each year since 2009.

The list analyzes five different categories: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure, ranking 140 cities across the world each year.

Toronto is behind top cities Melbourne, Vienna, and Vancouver.

The 6ix received perfect scores on stability, healthcare and education, but lags behind the leaders in infrastructure and culture and environment.

In fact, Toronto had the poorest infrastructure score of any city in the top 10 list.

Rounding out the list below Toronto is Calgary in fifth, Adelaide, Perth, Auckland, Helsinki, and Hamburg.

Six of the top ten cities are located in Canada and Australia. The report’s authors say that is partly attributed to both countries’ low population density.

Also notable is Paris’ decline in the list, to 32nd of 140, which the report’s authors say can be partly blamed on recent terror attacks in the country.

One of the factors the report’s authors cite for the relatively poor performance of American cities on the index are ongoing controversies surrounding the deaths of unarmed black people at the hands of police.

The bottom 10 least “liveable” cities are largely found in the world’s current trouble spots: Kiev, Ukraine, Damascus, Syria, Tripoli, Libya and Harare, Zimbabwe all make the list.

Declining world stability is blamed for falling scores for 71 of the 140 cities included in the index.