[Acajack]

I will state again that I find Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa to be roughly equivalent for the topic we are discussing here.

There are some things that the Alberta cities have that Ottawa doesn't, and vice versa.

Overall it evens out.

Ottawa doesn't really have rail based transit and it has less of a business and youth oriented energy and can-do get up and go, but on the other hand it has the Byward Market which the other two do not.

Ottawa also has (or has access to) a fully-developed cultural scene in French that runs in parallel to the majority anglophone scene. While francophone culture is present in the Alberta cities, the francophone cultural scene in Ottawa-Gatineau is almost similar in scale to the cultural scene of an independent city of 250-300,000 elsewhere in Canada.

So you really have that two-in-one built in to this region's cultural dynamic.