‘Searching for the Best Place on Earth’ comes out next week, with a launch event at the Rio in November.
From witnessing gaudy new money to old-world charm, traversing the globe and witnessing vast swaths of humanity is bound to reveal some hard truths and dramatically change a person’s world view.
Justin McElroy won’t pretend that it doesn’t.
The longtime CBC municipal affairs reporter releases his first book, Searching for the Best Place on Earth, on Oct. 20 followed by a launch event Nov. 9 at the Rio Theatre.
The book represents something of a culmination for the serial ranker of all things, as McElroy has previously released roughly a dozen lists ranking everything from lakes to towns and TV shows.
His current project, however, was a different ball game altogether: 52 countries in 52 weeks and 100 cities along the way, starting in March 2024. McElroy keys in on cuisines, museums, national train systems along with the minutiae of what makes life tick across every continent outside of Antarctica.
For someone used to TV spots under three minutes in length at most, stretching out over 200-plus pages offered a unique set of challenges.
“You don’t get immediate feedback from the audience in terms of what they liked or what they thought was less than great about a story, and you just are sitting with that from editors — that’s strange,” McElroy says.
Only previous trip outside Canada was in Grade 12
The origins of his journey are rooted in McElroy’s long-time desire to get out and get after it. Now 39 years old, he had never been outside Canada or the U.S., save for a Grade 12 school theatre trip to London. The universal yearning for freedom during the COVID-19 pandemic also fuelled his travel bug.
Without spilling too many beans ahead of the book’s official launch date, two of McElroy’s Top 3 destinations are likely best sellers on Expedia and are as ubiquitous as travel plans come.
The same could easily be said for the destinations listed towards the bottom of the list at 99 and 100.
Vancouver fell into the 26th spot, while Montreal was the highest-ranked Canadian city at No. 8. McElroy suggests Vancouver has the best geography on the planet, but the home of the Habs simply has more of what makes a world-class city tick: affordable housing, business diversity, bustling nightlife, culture and a place for people of all socioeconomic backgrounds.
Mercifully, Toronto came in ranked 32nd.
“Under British Columbia law, I cannot say Toronto is better than Vancouver,” McElroy quips in his book.
But for all the levity McElroy is known for, the book does shed light on some of the darkest chapters in modern history. It’s led him to shift his perspectives about not only what’s happened abroad, but how he perceives life in a first-world country.
“I feel more deeply,” McElroy tells me. “When you get to see so many civilizations around the world, but also when you go to the sites of so many atrocities and see the ways that different people have suffered in the last 100 years, whether it’s at Auschwitz or in Bosnia or KGB prison camps or the killing fields in Cambodia, it makes you value things more.”
That notion of change was inevitable once McElroy arrived back in town in the spring of 2025. His rent shot up, friends were engaged or had kids and there were new faces and policies at work. A serial poster who’d all but given up on the online world while travelling, McElroy says Vancouver seemed like an angrier place once he got home.
‘No neighbourhood felt worse than Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside’
His world travels also seem to have crystallized his views on how successive governments have approached the Downtown Eastside. McElroy’s assessment of the neighbourhood leaves little to the imagination.
“I went to cities big and small, passed through the country with the highest GDP per capita on earth (Liechtenstein, at $231,713) and the 155th-highest (Laos, at $2,174), and explored all sorts of neighbourhoods. And in my year travelling the world, no neighbourhood felt worse than Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.”
“Vancouver has world-class mountains and world-class sushi and world-class glass towers reflecting the world-class public waterfront. We also have a ‘world-class’ concentration of human suffering, visible in a way that other wealthy cities have decided is wrong.”
Back on the record with Vancouver Is Awesome, McElroy offers the following.
“We’ve spent 30, 40, 50, or 60 years depending on how you want to look at it fussing about this,” he says. “Politicians talking past each other about the core health outcomes and the core visibility of things not improving and arguably getting worse. I think that says a heck of a lot about us, unfortunately.”
Justin McElroy: Searching for the Best Place on Earth launch event
When: Monday, Nov. 9. Doors at 6 p.m., event starts at 7 p.m.
Where: Rio Theatre, 1660 E Broadway
Cost: $20. Buy tickets on the Rio’s website