You may have seen this week’s edition of Maclean’s magazine, which has a feature on “Canada’s Best & Worst Run Cities.”
The story ranks 31 Canadian cities on a number of effectiveness and efficiency measures, and plots them on a chart with four quadrants: “Great service at a good price;” “Big spenders, but offer a lot;” “Save money, but little service;” and “Uh oh: not good at either.”
The good news is that Guelph is in the “great service at a good price” category. But, we came 20th in the rankings.
I always read these type of rankings with a critical eye, even when we do well, such as last month when Maclean’s named Guelph Canada’s fourth smartest city. It’s hard to know what their methodology is, and there are quite a few gaps in the data. As the article itself points out, it’s difficult to compare cities across Canada; for example, it’s unfair to compare our snowplowing efficiency with Vancouver’s, where they get a measly 37 cm of snow a year. Rankings are notoriously tricky; for example, Maclean’s recently designated Saskatoon the crime capital of Canada, but in this study, that city ranks seventh-best in safety and protection.
Having said that, the article makes a good point that municipalities in general need to do a better job of measuring performance and reporting on it. In Guelph, we are currently in the process of strengthening our performance measurement practices. I’ll have more to report on performance measures in my State of the City address in November.
Whenever rankings like this come out – regardless of Guelph’s place on the list – it’s a chance to look into the research and see what we can learn from it.
Filed under: Excellence in Municipal Governance
