The Absence of Awfulness

The Economist Intelligence Unit posted the results of their 'Most Liveable Cities' survey, and though Vancouver, Melbourne and Perth scooped top berth, Toronto made the top ten and garnered a 9th place finish. None too shabby considering our town's seemingly endless flow of mishap and bad luck of late.
CBC Unplugged describes these rankings as less about most good, and more about least bad("the honour is based in large part on an absence of awfulness"), but who are we to quibble, when a body or researchers as fastidiously named as the Economist Intelligence Unit tells us we're livable, or liveable, when we dispense with translating from the British.

For the most part, and despite gun violence, scandal, political ineptitude and a scarcity of good chocolate chip cookies, we would agree that Toronto is a great place to live and breathe. But while we're on the topic of breathing, we'll concede that the survey does not seem to take into account issues like smog and environmental healthiness. The study mostly concentrates on issues such as "transportation links, telecommunication links and supply of gas and electricity". Chief among the factors that elevated Canadian cities and felled U.S. ones, was risk for terrorism, which the E.I.U. considered an important component of determining "liveability."

So we're relatively absent of awful. Great. But we can still toward more cookies and less smog.