Last week I found this blog post, which ranks the US states based on how likely they are to survive a zombie apocalypse. As the post mentions, seeing as the zombie apocalypse is clearly unavoidable, it's important to plan ahead and learn where to be when it hits.
Canadian provinces are way too huge and there aren't quite enough of them to do quite the same sort of analysis north of the border. On the other hand, Canada still has plenty of cities, and seeing as two thirds of the country live in one of the 20 biggest cities, that could be a pretty good way of looking at things.
Instead of looking at 11 factors (ranging from number of veterans to number of triathletes), I looked at the following 6 factors:
Distance to Closest Military Base: Let's face it, when zombies come to get ya, you'll be hoping the military is close-by to help take care of things. Fortunately Canada has a ton of army, navy, and air force bases dotted around the country, but the cities closest to the bases are definitely more likely to handle their undead uprising.
Average Temperature: I'm not an expert, but I imagine if you're dead and frozen solid, you're less likely to be a threat than if you're dead and flexible. Fortunately, Canadian cities have fairly low average daily high temperatures!
Population Density: Zombie math is pretty simple: too many people + too small a space = brains. If you're trapped and surrounded by a lot of future-zombies you've got way worse chances than if you've got some space around ya.
Obesity Rate: This one's pretty straightforward - obese people make easy zombie targets. It's related to (though strangely not strongly correlated to):
Physical Activity: Rule #1 in Zombieland is "Cardio" for a good reason. More people who can escape zombies make for fewer zombies, which really is just better for everyone else.
Gun Ownership: Zombies don't like guns for exactly the same reason zombie apocalypse survivors love guns. Gun ownership data is unfortunately only available on a province-by-province basis, but it's hard to argue that the more guns that are around in a province the better equipped people are to handle the undead. [Edit: I had previously presented this number as guns per population - I actually used licenses per population.]
With all that said, here's the ranking of the best and worst Canadian cities to be in during a zombie apocalypse (overall score is out of 1.0):
Moral of the story:
- Don't live in southern Ontario - it's a zombie playground. Ontarians don't have a lot of guns, southern Ontario is relatively warm, and there's really nothing special going on in terms of physical activity and obesity.
- Do live in a provincial capital. They tend to have military bases, and more often than not are large with relatively low density (suburbia is way better for zombie defense than downtown, of course).
- I'm proud of Edmonton. Good job, us.
- Newfoundland has a lot of guns. This is probably worth following up on.
