City Magnets: Benchmarking the Attractiveness of Canada’s CMAs

City Magnets: Benchmarking the Attractiveness of Canada’s CMAs analyzes and benchmarks the features that make Canadian cities attractive to skilled workers and mobile populations. A looming demographic crunch threatens to generate labour shortages in Canadian cities, so cities without the ability to act as magnets and attract new people will struggle to stay prosperous in the decades ahead. In keeping with the Conference Board’s How Canada Performs: A Report Card on Canada, this study uses report-card rankings of outcomes, or proxies for outcomes, to show how attractive our cities are to people. The performance of 27 census metropolitan areas is compared across seven different domains: Economy, Health, Society, Housing, Environment, Innovation, and Education. A second, less detailed analysis, also ranks Canada’s 27 CMAs against 27 U.S. cities.