Toronto Second Best City Of Opportunity

Excuse us for being just a little bit biased. When it comes to Toronto – the site of Synergy Merchant Services’ headquarters – we tend to speak proudly. North America’s fifth largest city and certainly the largest in Canada, Toronto is world-class city known across the globe for it multiculturalism, entertainment and industrial landscape just to name a few things.

This past weekend, Toronto added yet another reason to be considered a top-notch city as it was ranked second, behind only New York City, as one of the world’s top 26 “Cities of Opportunity”. In the recent annual report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, Toronto ranked just 31 points behind New York City as the world’s best.

This is considered quite the feat given that Toronto’s large size is still dwarfed by such major spots as London, Paris and Hong Kong. Said Bill Sand, the director of thought leadership at PricewaterhouseCoopers: “New York might win because it’s really big and has been around a long time. But if you really look at it, New York didn’t blow the other cities away.”

According to an article published today by the Torstar News Service, the report took a look at ten specific categories that contribute to what makes a city so fantastic. Toronto ranked second in the areas of intellectual capital and innovation, as well as health, safety and security. Intelligence is central to the first category.

The Torstar article notes that Toronto is among the top cities in the world when it comes to classroom size in addition to literacy, math and science skills. Furthermore, the city’s fairly low crime rate, exceptional end-of-life care and performance of hospitals helped for it to rank highly in the second category.

Toronto didn’t top the charts in all categories, however. When it came to technology readiness and transportation and infrastructure, Hogtown ranked 11th and 13th respectively. Surprisingly, the city’s internet services leave much to be desired. Our broadband quality ranked lower than Istanbul.

And although Toronto ranked number one when it came to transportation and infrastructure due to the number of skyscrapers being built in the city, we posted low numbers in the other sections of this category. Wrote Torstar: “Limited transit coverage, the cost of public transportation and an insufficient number of licensed taxis contributed to our low rating.”