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Originally Posted by Drybrain
The only trouble with comparing Halifax and London, as we often do due to their comparable sizes, is that London is a second to third-tier city within its region, whereas Halifax is a first-tier regional centre. So that affects a lot including the desirability of each for migration, whether or not large business locate there, etc.
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For whatever reason I find that Canadians, particularly here in Western Canada (and not just on SSP) tend to be obsessed with "size" and population numbers, whereas in other countries people often talk of cities and towns more qualitatively. In the US to take one nearby example there's still a bit of a negative connotation to small, remote towns, but people rarely assume a similar rigid population-based pecking order. There are big cities with limited or bad reputations and famous, well-liked small towns and cities. Cities like New Orleans, Austin, Charleston, Portland ME, and on and on all have a good reputation despite being much smaller than the largest US cities. In the US a smaller place can be considered a top-tier destination whereas in Canada people assume it must be a limited backwater that will never be as good as the larger cities. Americans don't start talking about New Orleans by saying "oh, it's so small, but for a small town...".
Farther afield I'd say the correlation between population and importance or interestingness is even weaker. There are enormous Asian cities that are pretty much just factory towns, and there are tiny European cities that are more famous and offer more unique attractions to a visitor than any city in Canada.
I'm really not a Halifax evangelist in the least in person but every so often people here will ask me where I'm from. Surprisingly frequently without any prompting they'll ask me what the population of the city is. Then they build a mental model that Halifax is 1/3 of an Edmonton or whatever, and that's that. A while ago I was reading a travel forum and somebody from the US asked if there were any traffic issues to know about when visiting Halifax; somebody from Canada, not from Halifax, answered that Americans shouldn't even worry about it since Halifax is so small compared to American cities that it can't possibly have traffic jams that an American would consider noteworthy. I thought that amusing and bad advice was representative of how a lot of Canadians think. Weird vestigial insecurity from being in a small and sparsely-populated former colony? I am not sure.
I do think there is a hard lower limit of what you can find in smaller cities (though you have to take into account visitors, students, etc.) but it is usually greatly exaggerated and, well, Halifax isn't actually that small anymore. It's just being compared to larger and larger cities. If the political will were there it could have much better transit, or a big stadium, really tall buildings, a much larger and more bustling downtown core, or most other things cities have. The size of the population is not what is preventing those things from happening.
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And a lot of people like to say unemployment is low due to outmigration depressing the number of job candidates, but to debunk that, 2015-16 has so far seen higher-than-normal levels of population and labour-force growth here. 1.5% population growth over June 2015, and more than 2% labour-force growth.
Labour-force growth is faster than almost anywhere east of Regina. (Some small places like Trois Rivieres and Oshawa are doing better on paper.)
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I find that there tends to be special pleading about why Halifax is worse than it seems based on the same statistics generated using the same methodologies and applied to every city in the country. I have an easier time believing that the statistics are accurate than I do believing that Halifax is somehow a unique negative outlier that confounds standard attempts at statistical analysis.
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