The Top Sustainable Cities in Canada

"And the winners are: Edmonton (large city category), Halifax (medium city category), and Yellowknife (small city category).

Yellowknife remained as the top small city, but with updated data and new criteria, our other city leaders from last year fell behind. Ottawa needs improvement in areas such as providing tax incentives to attract green businesses, city council ethnic diversity, and median commuting distance. Quebec City needs to focus on poor air quality and lack of retrofit programs and tax incentives for green businesses...All but Winnipeg had waste diversion targets. Cities must continue to evolve: what worked five years ago may not work now.

Some cities are better at collecting and measuring sustainability-related performance data. For example, of the cities that responded to our survey, all except Charlottetown had some kind of GHG reduction target in place, but only four – Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, and Halifax – could quantify their current progress.

It’s clear that learning about and understanding sustainability has become important across Canada. Overall, cities are doing a good job of self-regulating: setting GHG emission reduction targets for the city corporation, banning pesticide on city-owned property and mandating environmentally friendly design for new city buildings."