One of the big banks put out a ranking of the best cities in Canada to work and live in. I don’t know why the bank bothered to do it because it doesn’t seem to fit in with what banks do, which is focus all their efforts on making money. Maybe they had some high-priced help sitting around the corporate office with nothing to do but diddle around on their smart phones all day so they were given an innocuous project just to keep them busy for a while. 20 major cities were ranked based on the cost of buying a house or renting, tax rates, the job market and unemployment rate, and the average income of the city. Ottawa came in at #1 and St John’s was at the bottom. Toronto was second last and Vancouver was at #17. Regina ranked #6 and Saskatoon was right in the middle at #10. One thing I noticed when looking at Montreal (#11) and Quebec City (#2) was that Quebec’s combined sales tax, GST and PST, is 15%. And I grit my teeth at having to tack on 11% to most things I buy here. Perhaps when the pendulum has swung back to where Saskatchewan is pulling in the kind of resource revenue we used to get the province will knock our PST back down to 5%…….oh look, I just made a funny!
That’s Coffeetalk. I’m Vic Dubois.