Where is the best place to live? Many Canadians are convinced they already know the answer: Wherever they are now. But as proud as we are of our hometowns, there are some cities that simply have it all. And for the second consecutive year that place is Ottawa.

Year after year, our nation’s capital excels on our list but we know there are naysayers out there. On the off-chance readers get the idea we have a soft spot in our hearts for the nation’s capital and played favourites, we shuffled the data a bit and used a tool to reweight our scoring system to see if Ottawa would be dislodged. It didn’t budge from its perch: Ottawa is unassailable as Canada’s Best Place to Live in 2017.

As you explore this year’s rankings, you, too, can play with the variables with our new interactive tool. It might be that you’re more interested in a thriving arts scene and are not alarmed by higher-than-average crime rates. Or costs be damned, you simply want somewhere milder in the winter. Go ahead and dial the different inputs up or down. Based on your priorities, you can find your own Best Place to Live.

At MoneySense, we are unwavering in our views about what makes one city better than another. It should be prosperous, but affordable. Safe, yet easy to get around. And it should have the type of weather that draws you outdoors.

Photo gallery: Top 25 Best Places to Live »

This year we’ve undertaken our most ambitious report yet, ranking 417 cities, towns and villages. That’s almost double the number of communities we’ve looked at in previous years. By doing so we now capture communities with populations as tiny as 9,000.

Tracking the data for hundreds of Canadian cities is a significant task. To help us accomplish this, we turn to Environics Analytics and other partners to help gather the most comprehensive data set possible.

Why Ottawa

Big cities love to compare themselves to one another. The rivalry between Edmonton and Calgary is well established. Vancouver frequently compares itself to Toronto, very favourably of course. Toronto doesn’t think any city is worthy of comparison, in Canada at least. Ottawa never seems to enter the conversation.