UPDATE: Check out our 2018 ranking of the most miserable sports cities!

The Chicago Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908 — the longest and most miserable championship drought in the big four professional sports leagues (NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB). But at least Chicago sports fans can turn with pride to the Blackhawks, winners of two Stanley Cups in the past five years, and the Bulls, winners of six NBA championships with Michael Jordan in the 1990s.

Not every city’s sports fans are quite as fortunate. In some proud cities, the misery of losing is a way of life: having a playoff-bound team is far from guaranteed, making a deep run in the post-season would be a rare gift from the gods, and the phrase “plan the parade” is just a cruel joke from a friend in Boston.

It ain’t easy being a long-suffering sports fan in cities like Toronto or Cleveland, Minneapolis or Washington, and these loyal, but poor souls deserve our respect and admiration. So we set out to design the Misery Score to rank those major sports cities where it’s most difficult to keep the faith year after year. We wanted to do this in a rigorous fashion — no punditry or judgment calls — and include all major sports cities in North America.

For this analysis, we considered those cities in the US and Canada with at least three teams in the big four professional leagues (it’s not hard to be bad with just one or two teams; sorry Buffalo and Cincinnati). We weighed playoff appearances, playoff series wins, and championship wins in the Misery Score. We also relied heavily on recent success, since there’s no better way to forget a drought than with a lot of winning (we’re looking at you, Red Sox fans). See the Appendix for details on our scoring system and city clustering choices.

Here, in order, are the top five most miserable sports cities in North America.

1. Cleveland

Cleveland just edges out Toronto for the title of most miserable sports town. Sports fans here are a hardy, but truly miserable, bunch. Without a championship to celebrate since 1964, they have suffered through more shame, embarrassment and heartbreak than fans in any other city. Yet these fans stridently believe that one day, some day, the Cleveland sports curse will finally be lifted.

Cleveland’s past half century in sports is dotted with singular, disastrous events that have become seared in this city’s collective consciousness. Consider Cleveland’s long-suffering football team, the Browns. In the 1981 divisional playoffs, with the Browns needing just a field goal to seal the win, Coach Sam Rutigliano ordered the fateful Red Right 88 play, which led to an interception at the goal line, and the loss; in 1987, with the Browns leading by 7, John Elway and the Denver Broncos miraculously executed The Drive in the final minutes of the AFC Championship, dispensing of Cleveland in dramatic fashion; the next year, once again on the verge of winning the AFC Championship, The Fumble sealed the Browns’ fate in heartbreaking fashion.

But even since these painful heartbreaks, the Browns have also for the most part been just plain bad. The team hasn’t won a playoff game since 1995, and hasn’t won more than 7 games in a season since 2007. And not only have the Browns had trouble winning in Cleveland — they’ve also had trouble staying in Cleveland, as fans suffered the further embarrassment of not fielding a football team at all between 1996 and 1998 after owner Art Modell shipped the players off to Baltimore.

With Cleveland’s basketball team, the Cavaliers, the city has suffered similar bouts of collective misery. In 1989, although the Cavs had swept the season series 6-0 over the Chicago Bulls, Michael Jordan dashed Cleveland’s playoff hopes with The Shot, forever posterizing the city in one of basketball’s iconic moments. Decades later, the NBA’s biggest star and hometown hero, Lebron James, humiliated the city with The Decision to leave Ohio for the balmy beaches of Miami.

It only gets worse. Baseball’s Cleveland Indians have not won a World Series since 1948. The team’s thirty-year slump through the 60s, 70s and 80s inspired Major League, that famous cinematic homage to terrible baseball. The Curse of Chief Wahoo has weakened in the intervening years, but never let up completely: José Mesa’s blown save in Game 7 of the 1997 World Series, and the team’s embarrassing 2007 ALCS loss to the Red Sox after leading the series 3-1, are just the latest in a long line of heartbreak for Indians fans.

With Lebron James’ dramatic return to the city in 2014, there is again hope that the curse will be broken. Cleveland’s future now rests on his shoulders.

2. Toronto

Whereas Cleveland fans’ suffering has often come through heartbreak — the agony of seeing a championship slip through their fingers — Toronto fans have, for the most part, suffered in a more soul-crushing way. Toronto’s is a grinding, slow-burning torment, the result of year-after-year of losing seasons, poor decisions, and little expectation of future success.

You can’t talk about Toronto sports without starting with the Maple Leafs. The last time the Leafs won a Stanley Cup (and even appeared in a Stanley Cup final) was in 1967, when the NHL had only six teams. Since the ‘04-’05 lockout-cancelled season, the Leafs have made the playoffs just once, in 2013. That year, in the first round, the team managed to squander a 4-1 lead to the Boston Bruins in the final ten minutes of Game 7, and lost in overtime in dramatic (but inevitable) fashion. It was an epic collapse, but just the latest example of the Leafs ability to find new and creative ways to fall out of playoff contention year after year. This season, a once unthinkable series of events has occurred: after years of selling out the Air Canada Centre, fans are finally voting with their feet and deciding not to come; and, for the first time since 1972, the Maple Leafs were dropped from the iconic Hockey Night in Canada Saturday broadcast. Things are glum in Leaf-land.

If you thought it couldn’t get any worse for Toronto sports fans, consider the Blue Jays, who just recently took the mantle of most playoff-starved team in any major sport. The glory of the back-to-back World Series wins in 1992 and 1993 has long since faded, as the Jays haven’t made the playoffs since. Like the Leafs, who occasionally trot out geriatric stars from the 60s for the ceremonial opening faceoff, the Jays try to give their fans a little pick-me-up by showing off their own aging alumni, from Roberto Alomar to World Series hero Joe Carter.

The legacy of the Toronto Raptors is one of excitement but unfulfilled promise. While the team has managed to draft phenomenal rookie talent, including Vince Carter, Tracy McGrady and Chris Bosh, Toronto fans know that inevitably these promising players go looking for greener (i.e., American) pastures. The Raptors may have been fun to watch in the high-flying Vince Carter years, but they were never a serious contender. This year, with a solid roster and celebrity fans like lint-rolling rap star Drake, the team is showing renewed signs of life.

3. New York City (Mets-Jets-Islanders)

It’s not easy being a fan of New York’s “little brother” teams — the Mets, Jets and Islanders — who are forever intertwined by the fate of history and geography (the Mets and Jets long shared a home in Queens’ Shea Stadium, while the Islanders are based in neighboring Long Island). Not only do their bigger, more glamorous New York counterparts (the Yankees, Giants and Rangers) get more than their fair share of attention, they also do more than their fare share of winning. But these proud fans are among the most loyal in sports, and wear their misery as a badge of honor.

The Mets have had only three playoff appearances in the past twenty-six years, and just one in the past fourteen. In 2000, when they finally returned to the World Series, they faced their Bronx rivals in the Subway Series. Needless to say, it didn’t work out in the Mets favor. More recently, the Mets were eliminated from the playoffs on the final day of the regular season in both 2007 and 2008 (their last game in Shea Stadium), and haven’t put together a winning season since.

It’s been a long time since the Jets won the Superbowl, back in 1968. After the team’s low point in 1996 where they notched a dismal 1-15 record, much of the fans’ angst has concerned the parade of uninspiring quarterbacks, who have fizzled out due to injury or poor play. Off the field, former coach Rex Ryan’s storylines — from his ability to overcome dyslexia, his 100-pound weight loss following lap-band surgery, and his widely reported foot fetish — have provided a sometimes welcome distraction from the team’s on-field woes.

For a team that was absolutely dominant in the 1980s (winning four straight Cups, led by the amazing Mike Bossy), it’s been a traumatic fall from grace for the Islanders, who haven’t won a playoff series in over twenty years. Besides being pretty bad on the ice, the Islanders are also known for disastrous dealings off of it, signing ruinous long-term contracts (like Alexei Yashin’s 10-year $87.5M deal and Rick DiPietro’s ridiculous 15-year $67.5M contract) that have severely limited their ability to field a strong team.

4. Houston

It’s been something of a lost decade for baseball fans in Houston, since the Astros peaked in 2005 with their one and only World Series appearance (they were swept in four by the White Sox). That team featured big names like Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio in the infield, and Andy Pettitte and Roger Clemens on the mound. The Astros have struggled mightily since then, recording only two winning seasons, and putting together a miserable string of three consecutive 100+ loss seasons. In 2013, the team made the jarring switch over to the American League. Fans and former Astros greats haven’t been happy with the move, but more importantly for the city, it just hasn’t helped the Astros win.

Unfortunately for Houstonians, their football and basketball teams also haven’t given them much to cheer about recently. Football fans suffered perhaps the ultimate humiliation, losing their Oilers, who moved to Nashville in 1997. A lonely five years without football ensued, before the city was granted the expansion Houston Texans. Despite the return of a team, the misery hasn’t let up, with endless losing seasons and only two brief playoff appearances.

Since the Rockets’ magical back-to-back NBA championships in 1994 and 1995, the team has shown several moments of promise, led by players like Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady between 2002 and 2009, and more recently by superstars James Harden and Dwight Howard. Despite the high-wattage names, the Rockets have surprisingly won only a single playoff series in the past seventeen years, leaving fans feeling that they deserve better.

5. Minneapolis-St. Paul

Though all of the Twin Cities’ teams have been reasonably competent at one time or another, they just never manage to break through. It’s the type of misery that makes being a Minnesota pro sports fan a rather frustrating experience.

Take the Twins, the only local franchise to have won a championship (‘87, ‘91). They followed their last Series win with ten straight regular season exits, followed by a decade in which they were absolutely destroyed by the Yankees in the first round of the playoffs on four separate occasions (swept twice, lost 3-1 twice). The Twins have not managed a winning season in the past four years, and the future is not looking bright.

The Vikings have appeared in the Superbowl four times, but the last was almost forty years ago, and of course they’ve never won. A particularly gruesome heartbreak occurred in 1998, when the Vikings went 15-1 in the regular season. In the NFC championship game, the Vikings led the Atlanta Falcons by 7 with just over two minutes remaining. Kicker Gary Anderson, who hadn’t missed a field goal all season, whiffed it from 38 yards; the Falcons miraculously tied the game, and won it in overtime. Vikings fans have never forgotten.

The Wild began as an NHL expansion team in 2000-2001, and have actually been fairly good, making the playoffs on a regular basis. But nobody has ever thought the Wild to be a real contender. It still remains a major point of shame for the hockey-mad city that it managed to lose its beloved North Stars to (of all places) Dallas, Texas, after the 92-93 season.

Finally, the hoops-playing Timberwolves haven’t made the playoffs in ten years, but feature some promising youngsters on their roster. The return of Kevin Garnett this season is more symbolic than anything — nobody expects much more than trash talk and a few fierce snarls from KG before he calls it quits — so fans aren’t holding their breath for the bottom-dwelling T-Wolves to emerge as a powerhouse any time soon.

Which city do you think deserves to be in the top 5? Follow us on Facebook or Twitter and join the discussion.

Methodology Notes

Cities with Multiple Teams

Several large cities in North America have more than one professional team in the same league. To handle these cases, we divided fans up into natural allegiances, and calculated separate misery scores for each set of fans. Chicago is an easy one: one set of fans supports the Cubs (Chicago A), while the other supports the White Sox (Chicago B). Los Angeles is similar, with those supporting the Clippers (Los Angeles A) and those supporting the Lakers (Los Angeles B). Anaheim-based teams the Angels and the Ducks are not included due to geography, and since their fan bases are not as readily associated with the set of LA teams.

The San Francisco Bay Area has two football teams and two baseball teams (and a single basketball and hockey team). Those in the East Bay back the Raiders and Athletics (San Francisco Bay Area A), and those in SF and the peninsula back the 49ers and Giants (San Francisco Bay Area B).

Finally, there is the complexity of New York City. There are of course many exceptions to the clustering that we selected, but generally speaking, we have the “big brother” and “little brother” teams of New York. The Rangers and Knicks (who both play in Madison Square Gardens), along with the Yankees and Giants, have a somewhat consistent fan base (New York City A). Similarly, the Jets and Mets (who shared Shea Stadium in Queens), along with the New York Islanders (who are from neighboring Long Island), tend to share fans based on geography and a common history (New York City B). We omitted from our analysis the New Jersey Devils, as well as the Brooklyn Nets (who may still be finding a consistent fan base after moving from New Jersey).

The Misery Score Explained

We first compute a misery score for each team, as follows: a team gets a demerit point for each year since (i) it last made the playoffs, (ii) it last won a playoff series (which doesn’t include MLB play-in game wins), and (iii) it last won a championship. We cap each of the three above point values at 30, because the average fan’s age in the major sports is approximately between 42 and 43, and the age of 12 or 13 is the general age of enlightenment when fans start to really understand sports (and the misery that comes with losing). These points are added together, which gives each team a number of points between 0 (if the team won a championship last season) and 90 (if the team hasn’t made the playoffs in the past 30 years); we then normalize these values onto the [0,100] scale, to get a team-level misery score.

Finally, for each city, we take a simple average of its component teams’ misery scores, to get an overall city-level misery score. For ease of interpretability, we bucket these city scores into 4 categories: green (0-15), yellow (15-30), orange (30-45) and red (45+). Green means that you only need to look back, on average, about 5 years to see a lot of success (Boston); yellow look back 10 years (St. Louis), orange look back 15 years (Atlanta), and red over 15 years (Cleveland, Toronto and New York City B).

Note that we have only chosen to display NFL champions since the first Superbowl (in 1967). Teams with their last win prior to that (ex. Detroit) are marked as “NA” in our graphic.

For a country with only 35 million residents, Canada certainly produces its fair share of ultra-wealthy families, with nearly 90 worth over $1B. Names like Thomson, Saputo, Coutu, Sobey, Stronach and Bombardier are familiar to many. But most of these wealthy Canadians are confined to a handful of the most populous provinces and to a narrow set of industries, like media, grocery, oil and finance. But what about, say, Prince Edward Island — how do ambitious businesspeople generate wealth in the pocket-sized province known primarily for fishing and tourism? Or the Yukon Territory, known most for its mining but also a relative powerhouse in manufacturing and hydroelectricity?

We decided to investigate where the wealth lies in each region of Canada. What follows is a list of the richest Canadians (individual or family) residing in each of the country’s provinces and territories. In some cases, where a single determination is difficult to make (as much of the wealth is locked up in private enterprises), we present a collection of the wealthiest residents. In Nunavut, where most of the funding arrives from federal sources and non-resident companies own most large assets, a selection was not made.

The Provinces

Alberta

Canadian sports fans know Daryl Katz as the billionaire owner of the bottom-dwelling Edmonton Oilers, who haven’t come close to making the playoffs since Katz took over the reins of the team in 2008. Though Oilers fans have resolved themselves to a team in perpetual rebuilding mode, the success of Katz’s non-hockey businesses have propelled him to be the 13th richest Canadian, and the wealthiest in Alberta. His empire of pharmacies, which include chains like Rexall and Pharma Plus, number over 1800 and stretch over most of Canada and some of the United States. The Rexall brand lends its name to the Oilers’ home arena in Edmonton and to York University’s giant tennis stadium in Toronto. Despite the team’s losing ways, Oilers fans can at least now look forward to Katz’s vision of a revitalized Edmonton Arena District sprouting up downtown.

British Columbia

Vancouver investor Jim Pattison may very well have the most motley collection of assets among the rarefied set of Canada’s billionaires. His aptly named Jim Pattison Group (which as of 2013 was the largest privately held company in Canada) oversees subsidiaries both weird and wonderful: novelty publications and museums (the Guinness Book of World Records and Ripley’s Believe it or Not! franchise), illuminated sign businesses (Pattison Sign Group), car dealerships (all under the friendly Jim Pattison brand), bodyshops, packaging groups (Genpak), a giant coal export terminal, and a network of radio stations stretching from BC to Manitoba. The Saskatoon-born Pattison is the sole owner of this private empire, but his son, also Jim Pattison, is ready to step into his father’s shoes when necessary (with no company name change necessary).

Manitoba

Most travelers flying in on a chilly morning to Winnipeg’s James Armstrong Richardson International are likely not familiar with the airport’s namesake. But the man himself, and the sprawling (and extraordinarily wealthy) Richardson clan, are a deep part of the economic, political and educational fabric of Canada. James Armstrong Richardson’s grandfather arrived in Kingston, Ontario from northern Ireland in the 1820s and promptly began a successful tailor business. Forced to take payment in grain rather than cash, it was a natural step to enter the grain industry, and the agricultural empire known as James Richardson and Sons (later based in Winnipeg) was born.

James Armstrong Richardson is likely known more for his role in aviation than with the family business, having founded Western Canadian Airways, which for a time in the late 1920s was the second largest airline in the entire British Empire. The achievements of other members of the Richardson family are equally fascinating. His brother, George, was a well-known hockey executive who was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame many decades after his untimely death in World War I. Son James was a cabinet minister for Pierre Trudeau, while daughter Agnes served as the first female chancellor of Queen’s University. Son George and then grandson Hartley (current CEO) led the company’s expansion through the latter half of the 20th century into oil and gas exploration, financial services and property management, all the while maintaining the massive private company in the family’s hands.

New Brunswick

For a long time, the Irving family managed to fly under the radar while gradually becoming one of the most powerful — and wealthiest — families in all of North America. They’re in oil. Shipbuilding. Media. Pulp and paper. You name it. They’re the largest landowner in the US state of Maine, and the fifth largest private landowner in all of the United States. But most Canadians, and Americans, have hardly heard of them.

Recently, the (relative) veil of secrecy has started to lift. As it turns out, the family’s business has involved more drama, backstabbing and feuding than an entire season of Downton Abbey. Descendants of scion K.C. Irving have split off into factions, and the new tell-all Irving vs Irving aims to unearth this clan’s dirty laundry for all to see.

Newfoundland and Labrador

Outside of Newfoundland, Danny Williams may be best known as the premier who traveled to the United States for a specialized heart operation, triggering a wave of angst over his implicit criticism of the Canadian healthcare system. Inside the province, however, the Rhodes scholar-turned-lawyer-turned-politician has been something of a folk hero to many (though not all). By the early 2000s, Williams had already earned the nickname “Danny Millions,” for his successful law career and $225M sale of Cable Atlantic (of which he was the primary shareholder). Premier between 2003 and 2010, Williams’ term is remembered for tangles with Prime Minister Stephen Harper over offshore oil royalties (Williams won that fight). These days, Williams splits his time between CEO duties for the St. John’s IceCaps, and developing the sprawling Galway Development in St. John’s, which some analysts now value at over $5B (he’s said to have bought the land for a just a few million in the 1990s).

The Dobbin family is one of Newfoundland’s most storied business clans. Patriarch Craig founded CHC Helicopters, at one time the largest helicopter operator in the world. Of his five children, son Mark most vigorously kept the entrepreneurial spirit going, first leading CHC Helicopters in the years after Craig’s death, then using the fortune to found Killick Capital, a private equity group focusing on aerospace, and becoming a venture capital investor in numerous businesses in Atlantic Canada. And, it turns out, he tweets a lot about St. John’s.

With a relatively low profile, Ches Penney has perhaps become Newfoundland’s most powerful businessperson. His Penney Group of companies dabbles in everything from construction (Pennecon), automotive dealerships, commercial properties, and even fishing rights and processing facilities in Newfoundland’s infamously overfished waters.

Nova Scotia

What began with J.W. Sobey as a door-to-door meat delivery business in 1907 in the town of Stellarton, Nova Scotia has exploded into the second biggest grocery company in the entire country. After first dominating Atlantic Canada with the Sobeys chain, the family business marched west through Canada beginning in the 1980s, swallowing up more and more stores as it went. Their grocery empire now includes Foodland, FreshCo (Price Chopper), Thrifty Foods, IGA, and more recently, Safeway Canada.

Frank Sobey, who first convinced dad J.W. to expand his butcher business to a full service grocery store, is credited with driving the initial massive expansion of the company until his death in 1985. Along the way, he also picked up the Empire Theatre chain (which was sold in pieces to Cineplex and Landmark in 2013) as well as the Atlantic Shopping Centres properties (later Crombie REIT). These days, although Sobeys’ parent company Empire is publicly traded, its board of directors is populated by a who’s who of the Sobey family tree, including Frank’s sons Donald and David, and grandsons Paul, Rob, Karl and Frank.

Ontario

No surprise here. The Thomson family, majority owners of the media conglomerate Thomson Reuters, are the richest family in Canada by a huge margin, with a wealth estimated at over $30B. Current patriarch David, grandson of Roy (namesake of Toronto’s grand Roy Thomson Hall, to which the family donated significant rebuilding funds), is a relative spring chicken at just 57 years old. With all of that petty cash sitting around, the Thomson family has made a few fun investments that are likely out of reach for most Canadians, including owning a piece of the Winnipeg Jets and their arena the MTS Centre, as well as paying the highest price ever for an Old Master painting: over $100M for Peter Paul Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents.

In (a very distant) second place is the Weston family, overseers of the Loblaws grocery empire. They’re doing alright too, with just over $11B in assets.

Prince Edward Island

In 1980, a bold, 25-year old Islander named Danny Murphy raised enough money from family and his own savings to purchase PEI’s first two Tim Horton’s franchises. Since then, the Murphys have taken over the province’s hospitality industry, with an obvious focus on doughnuts, bagels and coffee. Danny himself owns no fewer than 20 Tim Hortons restaurants (including all locations in PEI), 10 Wendy’s, numerous hotels and a Leon’s Furniture store; brothers Kevin, D’Arcy, Stephen and Joe own another 45 restaurants between them throughout Atlantic Canada, Quebec and Ontario (including over 30 Tim Hortons). And if that wasn’t enough, Danny also married into a Tim Hortons franchise family — wife Martie owns the two most popular Timmy’s locations in all of Canada, out west in Fort McMurray, Alberta.

Regis Duffy is perhaps no less wealthy an Islander than Danny Murphy, but took a far different — and far more scientific — route to get there. As a dean and chemistry professor at the University of Prince Edward Island, Duffy founded Diagnostic Chemicals Limited (DCL) in 1970. By the early 2000s, with DCL operating 5 manufacturing facilities in the Maritimes, Duffy cashed out, and the biochemical division was renamed BioVectra DCL, which quickly become a bioscience powerhouse in Eastern Canada. Today, though Duffy remains an emeritus member of BioVectra’s management team, his primary focus is on bioscience investment and philanthropy in the region.

Quebec

The Saputo cheese empire had its humble beginnings in Sicily, where young Lino — the future billionaire founder and chairman of Canadian behemoth Saputo, Inc. — helped deliver his father Giuseppe’s specialty mozzarella to local clients. After immigrating to Montreal in the 1950s and officially starting their eponymous cheese business, the family saw the burgeoning pizza craze as a can’t-miss opportunity, and soon cornered the explosive mozzarella market. Through a series of acquisitions beginning in the 1990s, the company has consolidated itself as the world’s eighth largest dairy producer. They now oversee iconic Canadian brands like Dairyland and Vachon (maker of the Jos. Louis), Wisconsin names like Black Creek and Great Midwest, and even Australia’s oldest dairy producer Warrnambool Cheese and Buttery Factory. While older son Lino Jr. now steers the Saputo Inc. empire as CEO, younger son Joey probably has a bit more fun as the owner of the Montreal Impact MLS soccer team and their Saputo Stadium, as well as Italian club Bologna.

Saskatchewan

Not even a decade ago, the most talked-about person from Saskatchewan was Calvin Ayre, founder of online gambling mecca Bodog. He appeared on the cover of Forbes’ 2006 billionaires issue, and was among Star Magazine’s “Most Eligible Billionaire Bachelors” in 2007. But since then, the playboy with the jetsetting lifestyle has gone into a downward spiral, and so too has his wealth. Indicted in 2012 by US prosecutors for running an illegal sports betting business, Ayre is still on the run, and maintains a comfortable spot on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Most Wanted List.

These days, it is the Semple family, owners of the Brandt Group — the largest privately held company in Saskatchewan — who garner the headlines. The Semples made their fortune as dealers of heavy industrial and agricultural equipment, but to locals in Regina, they are perhaps better known for being part-owners of the Regina Pats, and for their ostentatious mansion just outside the city limits on Route 6. It’s become something of a parlour game to dig up and trade photos of what is certainly the most garish property in the entire province.

The Territories

Northwest Territories

The Northwest Territories is vast and sparsely populated, but contains a bounty of strategically important resources and waterways. Much of the Northwest Territories’ cash comes from federally funded infrastructure projects whose goals are to connect the people and resources of the north with the rest of Canada. As such, the biggest moneymaking industries in NWT are construction, as well as services (hotels, food, entertainment) that help support those employed in the building projects. The Rowe, Gruben, Wainman and Pemberton families are the wealthiest in the Territories.

The Rowe family of Hay River specializes in heavy machinery operations, and supplements their wealth with property management and hotel assets.

The Gruben family, based in Tuktoyaktuk and founders of construction giant E. Gruben Transport (EGT), are known as one of the largest contracting and logistical companies in the Arctic. Northwind Industries, owned by the Wainman family and based in Inuvialuit, recently joined with EGT to win a massive $229M contract to build the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk all-weather highway. To protect the permafrost, construction of the highway is limited to winter months, which in fairness is basically most of the year.

Guy Pemberton rode a wave of success with Tuktoyaktuk-based Dowland Construction only to see it go under. It’s said that he recently bought up the assets of Dowland in a fire sale, and his company is now under contract to rebuild Inuvik’s famous “utilidors” — a city-wide network of pipes carrying water and sewage that sit above ground to avoid the damaging permafrost below.

Yukon Territory

Rolf Hougen, patriarch of the sprawling Hougen family of the Yukon and head of the Hougen Group of Companies, is perhaps the most admired businessperson in the Territory, recognized as someone who cared deeply about the community he worked in (and made plenty of money in). At one time, Hougen stores were the largest retailers in all of the Yukon, before the nationals (like Canadian Tire) and multinationals (like Walmart) arrived. Now, much of the company’s wealth resides in the extensive real estate holdings throughout Whitehorse and the Territory.

In 1958, Hougen stepped into broadcasting by starting the Northern Television Company. With the television industry threatened by the emergence of satellites in the 1960s, Hougen boldly proposed the idea of cable companies bundling satellite signals together to sell as a package consumers. Along with several partners from across Canada, he formed CanCom, which later became the Canadian broadcast behemoth Shaw.

Nunavut

In Nunavut (pop. 32000), where most of the funding for infrastructure and development arrives from federal sources and non-resident companies own most large assets, a selection was not made.

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The so-called Little Mosque on the Tundra sits two degrees beyond the Arctic Circle in the town of Inuvik, Northwest Territories. There, in the far north of Canada’s Far North, the mosque serves a small but thriving community of Arabic-speaking Muslims. Why these hardy immigrants chose this town, of all places, to make their home in Canada, is somewhat of a mystery (it is so far north and west that the direction of prayer to Mecca is through the North Pole!). As a country of immigrants, we have come to expect the cacophony of foreign tongues heard in the diverse neighbourhoods of Toronto or Vancouver. But as it turns out, Inuvik is just one of Canada’s many surprising, and oftentimes isolated, linguistic outposts.

To explore this phenomenon, we created an interactive map that displays which language besides English and French is most prevalent in different parts of the country. We divided the country into census divisions, and determined the popularity of a language by the number of residents in that division that primarily speak it at home (based on data from the 2011 census). There are certainly many interesting trends apparent in this map, but below we highlight a few of what are perhaps the most unexpected.

Yiddish in Quebec

Quebec has long had a thriving Jewish community (think names like Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen, Naomi Klein), and this group is generally thought of as part of Quebec’s anglophone community. However, many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe originally came speaking Yiddish, and though this rich and historical language is slowly marching toward critically endangered status, there remains a modest Yiddish-speaking community in and around Montreal, composed primarily of Hassidic Jews, and to a lesser extent, young hipsters trying to reconnect with the language of their ancestors. We’ll have to see in 10 years how this language — that is no longer really native to anywhere — is holding up in Quebec.

Gujarati in Northern Alberta

Fort McMurray is a long way from Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat state in India. Actually, Fort McMurray is far from just about anywhere. But as it turns out, several hundred Gujarati families have settled in this northern Alberta city, attracted by plentiful jobs in the booming oil and forestry sector. While Punjabi speakers dominate the British Columbia linguistic landscape, and Urdu has gained steam in the Greater Toronto Area, Gujarati — only the 7th most commonly spoken language in all of India — has taken hold in this unlikeliest of Canadian places.

Filipino in the Yukon

With its booming economy, driven primarily by mining, the Yukon has attracted a surprising wave of immigrants from the Philippines, who are more used to tropical heat and hurricanes than frozen winters and the midnight sun. Word seems to have gone around about the Yukon’s aggressive Nominee Program for new immigrants, so much so that now the Filipino-speaking population, based primarily in Whitehorse, comprises the largest non-English speaking language group in the entire territory.

Punjabi in BC

You know an immigrant group has “made it” when Hockey Night in Canada creates a special version of the show in its native tongue. So it is with Canadian Sikhs, whose dominant language Punjabi has become the most common South Asian language in Canada, and in particular in British Columbia. Outside of Vancouver and Victoria, where Chinese reigns among immigrants, Punjabi strongholds stretch from the south of the province near Abbotsford and The Okanagan all the way up to the isolated Northern Rockies. The famous Gur Sikh Temple in Abbotsford, built in 1911 by turn-of-the-century Sikh pioneers, is a testament to the community’s deep roots in the province.

Korean in New Brunswick

When you think “Koreatown” in Canada, you usually think of that famous stretch of Bloor Street in downtown Toronto, between Bathurst and Christie, with its delightful restaurants serving all manner of bibimbap and kalbi and kimchi, and plentiful karaoke bars blasting K-Pop. Over 50,000 Korean Canadians have settled in Toronto. But as it turns out, Moncton, New Brunswick has long been making its own push to grow its Little Seoul, advertising its churches, community centres and Korean-owned business to woo Korean immigrants to its already impressive 400-family community. Recently, however, New Brunswick’s Korean-Canadians have been feeling the economic pressure, and are starting to trickle back to Canada’s biggest cities.

Spanish in Quebec

Montreal is becoming ground zero for Canada’s new bilingualism, where residents increasingly speak just one of the country’s two official languages plus an additional immigrant language. In greater Montreal, over 600,000 people speak a language besides English or French as their mother tongue, with Arabic and Spanish leading the charge. When restricting to the language most often spoken at home, Spanish ekes out a small lead in the city of Montreal, as well as in many other Quebec cities including Drummondville, Sherbrooke, Lac-Mégantic, Shawinigan, Trois Rivières and Quebec City. This large influx of allophones (immigrants who speak neither English nor French) is causing some angst among politicians in Quebec, who are concerned that the French language is being further diluted by the new class of multicultural arrivals.

Aboriginal Languages in the North. And the Centre. And the East.

What is perhaps most surprising is the dazzling strength and diversity of Aboriginal languages in so many regions of Canada (Aboriginal languages refer to Inuit, Métis and all First Nations tongues). Cree, with almost 120,000 native speakers, appears in our map as one of the most dominant Aboriginal languages, with truly national reach: it stretches from the west in Alberta all the way to the east in Quebec (with smaller pockets of speakers in other areas too). More regional Aboriginal languages abound: in the north is Inuktitut, the principal language of the Inuit in Northwest Territories and Nunavut, along with Dene (sometimes referred to as Athabascan). Ojibway is dominant in Manitoba and northern Ontario, Innu in northern Quebec and Labrador, Atikamekw in southwestern Quebec, and Mi’kmaq in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Stoney (or Nakoda), a language spoken by just over 3000 people, is dominant in a small area of western Alberta that includes Banff, but like many small indigenous languages, is now struggling to stay alive, with so few children learning it as their native tongue.

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Methodology Notes

What does “Chinese” refer to in our map? Statistics Canada permits responders to indicate both a specific dialect of Chinese (e.g. Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghainese, Hakka, etc.) as well as a generic “Chinese” response. See an example data table here. Since a very large proportion of respondents simply choose “Chinese,” there is no way of knowing which dialect is most common in any particular region. As such, we decided to combine all Chinese dialects plus the generic “Chinese” into a single category.

Why do Aboriginal languages all appear as one colour? We thought about this a lot when creating the map, and the primary reason is that there are simply not enough colours in the visual spectrum to use a distinct colour (and texture) for each language so that the map is actually visually pleasing and comprehensible. The editorial decision was made to combine the Aboriginal languages into a single colour (while retaining the distinctions and language-specific details when hovering). Why do we think this was a good decision? Almost all of the feedback we’ve received has been “Wow, I’m so happy there’s so much purple, it’s so great how much of Canada is dominated by indigenous languages!”. The purple wave is so striking, so visually stunning, and it clearly communicates the strength of the Aboriginal population across much of Canada — this effect would have been lost if we had selected different colours, and it would look just like everyone else. So we believe we struck a good balance.

Early last year, Google released its diversity report, with the not-so-shocking revelation that only 30% of its employees are female. When you restrict to engineering positions (which excludes non-science jobs like sales and marketing), the numbers for women plummet further, down to a meager 17%. Other tech companies like Facebook and Twitter soon followed with their own diversity reports, revealing equally disappointing figures. In Canada, although no large companies have bravely offered to share their own numbers, some estimates suggest that only 25% of tech jobs in Canada are held by women.

But what about Canada’s universities? How do women fare in the vaunted professorship ranks of math and science departments at our most cherished public institutions? As it turns out, the numbers are even worse. Much worse.

The reasons to support diversity in Canada’s science departments are many, but perhaps the most practical is simply one of global competitiveness. It is no secret that math and science skills are becoming more important to a thriving economy, and while countries like India and China are churning out ever more science and engineering grads, the numbers in Canada are stagnating. We need all hands on deck, and that begins at our universities.

Among math, computer science (CS) and electrical/computer engineering (ECE) departments in Canada’s top universities, the percentage of women professors would seem humourously low if it didn’t make so clear that something is rotten in Canada’s elite institutions: McGill’s mathematics department has only two women among 40 professors, while Laval’s has only two out of 24. The University of Alberta can’t even reach 10% women in any of its math, CS or ECE faculties. As we dig deeper into the numbers, the story becomes only more troubling.

In his analysis of the tech world, Chris Gayomali from Fast Company writes that “it’s easy and funny to skewer Silicon Valley’s caricature as a white male patriarchy.” But it’s time we shine a light on the situation in our own elite universities.

The Data

We looked at the top 20 largest research universities in Canada (measured by number of graduate students), and for each focused our attention on the three faculties that correspond closely with the technology/STEM industry: mathematics, computer science, and electrical/computer engineering. We then calculated the percentage of full time “regular” faculty in each department that are women, by examining the university departments’ own websites. “Regular” faculty refers to tenure or tenure-track professors, but excludes what are generally teaching-only positions (like instructors). See the methodology section for precise details on our data.

The Results

Almost all CS and math departments in our study have women comprising fewer than a quarter of regular faculty. Only two universities — the University of Victoria and the University of Ottawa — exceed the 25% threshold. Among ECE departments, no faculty exceeds 20%, and all but one (Simon Fraser) are below the 15% threshold. What do these figures mean in practice? In many of our universities, a math, CS or engineering student would be lucky to encounter even a single woman professor at the front of the class in any given year — perhaps even over an entire academic career.

In the graphic above, we highlight the 25% and 10% thresholds in green and red not because 1 in 4 is admirable (it’s not) and 1 in 10 is poor (it is), but because these boundaries can start to frame the discussion in concrete terms, and can help to identify very reasonable parameters by which to evaluate our universities.

The Low Performers

Most would agree that a floor of 10% representation of women should be possible without much difficulty, even despite the so-called “pipeline problem” that may result in relatively fewer candidates. Yet so many of our universities fail to meet even this distressingly low bar. Carleton University in Ottawa stands out in this regard. Of the 29 regular faculty in its computer science department, there is only a single woman professor. In its Electrical and Computer Engineering departments, there are only 2 women out of 51 regular faculty. By any measure, these are stark and disturbing figures for Canada’s self-described “Capital University”.

The University of Alberta is another exceptionally shocking outlier in our dataset. It is the only one of our elite institutions to fall below the 10% threshold in all 3 of the departments that we investigated, with only 14 women employed among over 160 total regular faculty members across these departments.

Women cut a particularly lonely figure in Canada’s major ECE departments, where nearly half of the universities don’t exceed the 10% threshold. Standouts include Sherbrooke, Dalhousie, Laval, Memorial and Ottawa, each of whom employ just one or two women professors among a sea of male colleagues.

Among the few that publically acknowledge the challenges with their hiring practices is McGill University’s mathematics department. Walking the halls of Burnside Hall in Montreal, housing one of the great mathematics research facilities in our country, you’d encounter only two women among its 40 regular faculty members (a recent increase from just a single woman professor there). In a January 31, 2013 article in the McGill Daily, the math department’s chair Jacques Hurtubise was quoted as saying that the department is “working on” hiring more women, and that “we’re actually in the process of hiring a second woman right now.” That effort may have succeeded, but it’s no great achievement when your bar for success is so low.

The High Performers

Looking at the data, it is hard to point to any institution as a model for diverse hiring practices across all of its departments. However, the University of Ottawa and University of Victoria deserve recognition as outliers, containing the only departments in our sample that exceed 25% women: their departments of Computer Science have 45% and 35% women, respectively. However, lest we get too effusive with praise, we need only look to their their ECE departments, where UVic has only 10% women among regular faculty, while uOttawa has fewer than 6%. Perhaps they are not particularly positive outliers after all.

Conclusion

To those who spend time studying or teaching at Canada’s renowned science faculties, these findings may not be particularly surprising: there is a clear dearth of women among professorial ranks. But the scale of the problem is certainly quite staggering, with so many departments failing to reach even the most basic token threshold. There are likely many reasons for this imbalance, whether due to conscious or unconscious bias in hiring, a pipeline problem, cultural stereotypes, or any number of other posited causes. It’s time we take a closer look at Canada’s universities.

Methodology Notes

Departments generally list faculty members on their homepages. We determined gender based on name (when obvious), photo (if available on the department webpage), or outside research (teaching reviews written by students, etc.).

Not every university organizes its mathematics and computer departments according to the division we describe. In some cases, the CS and ECE departments are combined (in which case we report all numbers under CS); in other cases, math and statistics are combined (in which case we report all numbers under math). Finally, the University of Waterloo has several different mathematics departments; for this analysis, we focused on its Pure Mathematics Department.

What defines a full time “regular” professor? For the purposes of our analysis, we included only those professors classified as Professor, Assistant Professor or Associate Professor (and their French language equivalents in Quebec), which — generally speaking — cover tenure or tenure-track faculty that both teach and perform research. We excluded people employed primarily as teaching faculty (Instructors, Lecturers, Professors of Teaching), as well as Adjunct, Retired/Emeritus and Visiting Professors. We also generally tried to exclude professors who belong to a department “by courtesy” or are cross-appointed but belong primarily to a different department. Due to some irregular naming practices and incomplete data on departments’ own pages, we needed to make several judgment calls on whether to include or exclude certain people. Overall, the numbers should form a very accurate reflection of the composition of women among the senior ranks of Canadian STEM faculty.

Finally, we note that this data was collected in January of 2015. Departments may have gained or lost professors in the meantime, which may change the numbers.

Correction: In an earlier version, the University of Ottawa’s CS and ECE numbers were combined and presented as one in the CS chart, because uOttawa has a joint School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The university shared internal numbers with us which break down their professors by CS and ECE. The charts and article have been revised with the updated numbers.

Forget what you think you know about Toronto and Montreal. Hogtown and La Belle Ville may have 37 Stanley Cups between them, but when it comes to breeding hockey players, those storied hockey cities fall short. How about The ‘Peg, Cowtown, or even the City of Champions itself? Nope: the Prairies are good, but not that good. The West Coast? The Maritimes? The Far North? Not even close. Without a doubt, the best pound for pound hockey town in Canada is the unassuming, northern Ontario transportation hub of Thunder Bay.

It all started with a 22-year old scrapper named Jack Adams, who suited up for the Toronto Arenas (a predecessor to the Toronto Maple Leafs) eight times in the NHL’s inaugural season in 1917-18. He scored zero points that year, but racked up 31 minutes in penalties. He played fewer than half the games for that season’s Stanley Cup winners, but Adams remained in the league, and after a middling playing career became famous as coach and GM of the Detroit Red Wings. Adams was the first in a long and bountiful line of NHL players from the small town of Fort William, later to become known as Thunder Bay, after merging with Port Arthur in 1970.

This place is special. Firstly, it has simply produced an astounding number of NHL players for a city whose population has remained at about 100,000 residents since the 60s. The region of Thunder Bay has regularly churned out at least one NHL player (often more) for every 15,000 residents, a remarkable feat. Today’s NHL features Thunder Bay family connections like the four Staal brothers, two Pyatt brothers and the Chorneys (current NHLer Taylor and father Marc); oldtimers like all-time great Alex Delvecchio and all-stars Gus Bodnar and Charlie Simmer, are just a few of Thunder Bay’s native sons that went on to don NHL sweaters.

Secondly, Thunder Bay has produced NHL-ready players at a remarkably consistent rate — every season since the NHL’s founding in 1918 has featured at least one or even a handful of Thunder Bay products, which cannot be said for any other Canadian city of its size (or smaller).

To explore this argument more deeply, we generated an interactive heatmap of Canada, showing the concentration of NHL players from each region over the years, beginning in 1923 (the first year we were able to get complete NHL player data), and progressing in 10 year intervals. Regions of Canada are assigned a color intensity based on the number of players whose birthplace was in that region. The higher the number of players relative to the area’s population, the higher the intensity.

So what did we find?

Hockey Powerhouses

Besides Thunder Bay, we observe that the metropolitan areas of Toronto and Montreal have indeed been solid hockey factories since the very earliest years of the NHL. Certainly the fact that the NHL was, and in many ways still is, a product of the east coast of North America, has played a role in player development in these cities, not to mention that Toronto and Montreal were for a long time the only two Canadian cities with an NHL club to call their own. In today’s NHL, Toronto-area born players include PK Subban, Steve Stamkos, Rick Nash, Tyler Seguin and Brent Burns; Montreal-area born players include Martin Brodeur, Corey Crawford, Roberto Luongo, Martin St. Louis and Vincent Lecavalier.

It may surprise some readers, however, that Edmonton has also been cranking out NHL talent at an impressive rate, especially beginning in the 1980s (and at a per capita rate, Edmonton has outperformed both Toronto and Montreal since at least the 1990s, depending on the definition of the metropolitan areas of these cities). Hockey folk heroes like Mark Messier, Grant Fuhr and Scott Niedermayer all hail from the City of Champions, while the list of current players from Edmonton includes Jarome Iginla, Jay Bouwmeester, Joffrey Lupul and Johnny Boychuk.

After these three big cities, the output drops somewhat, with sizable cities like Winnipeg, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, Ottawa and Quebec City holding their own with a steady if unspectacular stream of NHL talent. The biggest cities in the east — Halifax and St. John’s — and in the west — Victoria and Vancouver — have only recently started to contribute its young men to Canada’s game in meaningful numbers.

Small but Strong

Many small communities throughout Canada have contributed more than their fair share of players. In our analysis, however, two regions stood out in particular. Firstly, the entire province of Saskatchewan, especially outside of the big cities of Regina and Saskatoon, is solid hockey country. These small towns aren’t exactly household names, and they are often one-and-done when it comes to NHL representation, but they sure give us great players: Aneroid (Patrick Marleau), Oxbow (Theoren Fleury), Kelvington (Wendel Clark) and Val Marie (Bryan Trottier) are just a few. Along with potash, hockey is definitely this province’s greatest export.

Secondly, the town most famous for its mines (though it should be for its hockey players): Sudbury. Forget about the huge number of players that this town has consistently churned out, certainly rivaling our champion Thunder Bay in this regard. There’s something in the water there (heavy metal, maybe?) that gives its native sons a certain unique quality. Whether it’s Eddie Shack (the “Nose”), Mike Foligno (the “Leap”), Ron Duguay (the “Hair”), or Todd Bertuzzi (let’s not go there), these guys have personality. Al Arbour wore glasses on the ice, for goodness sake. And we can’t talk about Sudbury without mentioning the heartache that the cities of Toronto and Vancouver have suffered under the helm of Sudbury-born Randy Carlyle and Mike Gillis. The NHL would not be the NHL without the Nickel City.

Family Ties

See if you can spot the great hockey families that light up our map over the years. Here are a few to get you started.

• the Sutters: Brent, Brian, Darryl, Duane, Rich, Ron and Brett
• the Staals: Eric, Jared, Jordan and Marc
• the Bouchers: Bill, Frank, Buck and Robert
• the Benns: Jamie and Jordie

Check out our world hockey map to see which region is the world’s undisputed hockey hotbed.

Methodology Notes

We divided Canada up into Census Divisions (the standard geographic unit of division used by Statscan), and assigned a color intensity proportional to the number of players per capita whose birthplace was in that census division. Due to the 2012-2013 lockout, our last map is for 2012 (and not 2013), where the data was smoother. A player is included in the map for year X if X falls between the start and end of his NHL playing career (even if only 1 NHL game was played). Some very large geographic regions are coloured bright red but have only produced a single NHL player (see Northern Manitoba in 2012); this is due to the very low population in these regions. We have provided a toggle button to remove colouration from regions with only a single player, which may be considered by some to be a fluke.