‘Quality of Life Study’ Celebrated by Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe is Actually Sourced From a Dubious Eastern European Website

Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe is celebrating a new “quality of life study” that purports to show the city he leads has become the “most liveable” in North America — although what Sutcliffe describes as a “study” is actually a dubious ranking sourced from a website based in Serbia.

Sutcliffe, who is up for re-election this fall, posted on social media this weekend that a “new quality of life study” has confirmed that “Ottawa is the most livable city not just in Canada, but all of North America.”

“We’re very lucky to live in Ottawa,” Sutcliffe boasted, noting the study shows “we rate very high in almost every category, including safety, cost of living, purchasing power, commute time, air quality, and the ratio of property prices to income.”

Screenshot: Mark Sutcliffe (X)

One thing Sutcliffe didn’t mention is that the “study” is not actually a “study,” or at least not an academic study or one conducted by professional researchers – it’s sourced from a website based in Serbia that relies on user-generated data.

Numbeo, which was created in 2009, bills itself as a “crowdsourced global resource for quality of life data.” The website lists a residential apartment building in Belgrade as its headquarters.

“Numbeo enables users to view, share, and compare information about the quality of life in cities worldwide,” the website states, noting it collects user-submitted data on living standards on topics like costs of living, crime rates, healthcare, pollution as well as traffic and commute times.

While trustworthy data on these topics is available through Statistics Canada or other public sources, Numbeo collects data by asking users to estimate prices or simply rely on their subjective “personal observations.” Some areas of the website include sections that do allow users to add sources that could include links to official data, however, these sections are often empty or sparse.

The only two actual sources cited in Numbeo’s data for Ottawa are links to the website of OC Transpo and a website showing admission prices for the Landmark Cinemas movie theatre in Orleans.

“Please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information,” a legal disclaimer on Numbeo’s website clarifies. “There is absolutely no assurance that any statement on the website is correct or precise.”

Source: Numbeo

Dubious websites have been a recurring theme during Sutcliffe’s term as mayor. In 2023, Sutcliffe issued a defiant 10-tweet response to a “study” claiming Ottawa was “overrated” — that “study” was later revealed to have been produced by an online gambling website run out of Romania.

Sutcliffe’s new social media post about Ottawa’s liveability links to a blog post titled “Ottawa places first among North American cities in new quality of life rankings” on a website called CIC News.

CIC News describes itself as “the world’s largest Canadian immigration news website.” The blog focuses on content about immigration and is associated with the Montréal law firm Cohen Immigration Law.

Unlike Sutcliffe’s social media posts, CIC News’ blog post does not describe Numbeo’s data as a “study” and clarifies that Numbeo is a “crowd-sourced database.” The blog post also includes information about Numbeo’s methodology that notes its data relies on “user-submitted information.”

Numbeo’s dubious methodology and reliance on user-submitted data has faced significant criticism and repeatedly made international headlines in the past, often being seized on by the international far-right as a source to back up xenophobic claims about crime and immigration.

Screenshots: Peter Sweden, Stanislas Rigault (X)

Over the last year, the website has been repeatedly referenced by far-right influencers and media outlets as the source for various claims that Dublin, Ireland, and Malmö, Sweden, were more dangerous than Baghdad, the capital of Iraq.

(Numbeo currently identifies several cities in Ontario, including Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie and Oshawa, as more dangerous than Baghdad).

Fact-checkers at Ireland’s The Journal newspaper emphasized that given its methodological problems, Numbeo’s “rankings are worthless for giving an indication of crime in cities.”

In 2017, after discovering the site allowed unlimited and anonymous reviews, a Swedish researcher illustrated how unreliable Numbeo’s data was by repeatedly leaving negative reviews for Lund, Sweden, until the sleepy Scandinavian university town rose to become the most dangerous city in the world.

In 2022, Agence France-Presse’s fact-checking team looked into claims from French far-right figures who similarly seized upon Numbeo’s dubious crime data to fuel anti-immigrant rhetoric. One criminologist told AFP that in his expert opinion, the website’s approach to gathering crime data was “worthless.”

After initially responding to a media request and asking for further information, Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe’s office did not provide a statement to PressProgress.

“Thanks for doing this research,” Sutcliffe’s Communications Director Tahera Mufti told PressProgress, noting she was not personally involved in the decision to publish the statement and was unaware of Numbeo or the “accuracy of their claims.”

In official documents, the City of Ottawa states that it is currently in a “housing crisis,” with the City citing data from the Ottawa Real Estate Board, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and Statistics Canada showing housing has become widely unaffordable in Ottawa, with house prices rising 55% and rental prices rising 27.5% between 2019 and 2025.

According to recent polling conducted by Sutcliffe’s own former campaign pollster, nearly two-thirds of Ottawa residents (62%) are concerned they could lose their home or rental unit if their financial situation changed, and four in five (82%) are concerned about the state of housing in Ottawa.

The City of Ottawa says one in four residents experienced food insecurity in 2024, an increase of 15.3% since 2019.

Update: Following publication of this story, the Mayor’s Office indicated that it had not taken any further steps to look into Numbeo’s website in response to questions about the credibility of its data.

“I was not able to do further looking into the company,” Sutcliffe’s Communications Director Tahera Mufti told PressProgress. “I don’t have a quote for you.”