The purpose of the State of Canadian Cities report is to bring together current data to present a balanced picture of how our cities are evolving, and to strengthen the knowledge base used to develop the Smart City Challenge. In a short report like this, one cannot hope to present a comprehensive portrait of the state of our cities, but a judicious selection of key indicators can offer glimpses into important aspects of our urban reality.

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      The framework we use to choose and present our indicators is that of urban sustainability. Sustainability has been defined in many different ways, but at the heart of most definitions is the notion that a city is sustainable only if it meets the social and economic needs of its residents without undermining its ecological continuity over time. Thus, we divide our indicators into social, environmental and economic dimensions.

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      In total, we present 15 indicators that were selected because they could be populated with data from a national agency using consistent data gathering techniques going back to 1996, allowing us to observe trends over time. We have relied largely on primary data collected from the Canadian Census, the Census of Agriculture and the Transport Association of Canada, plus a couple of secondary sources. Unfortunately, not all indicators of interest to us could be included in this report, either because the raw data could not be aggregated in a simple, time-efficient way (e.g., voting behaviour) or the data were lacking altogether (e.g., municipal innovation).