Ontario · Civic arena
Oshawa drinking water hardness is 125 mg/L on OpenStats, plus City Score rankings and local readings.
Civic arena · hometown HUD
#136 of 343
52% City Score XP
7/8 pillars on the board
Decade trail
Oshawa packs 7 of eight open-data pillars into its composite standing. Tap a rival below to see how the hometown stacks up head-to-head.
Rivalries on deck
Hardness, pH, and lead from municipal reports on the OpenStats water atlas.
Full Oshawa water quality report →City Score rankingsCompare cities · vs Thorold · vs Owen SoundHardness guide
Watershed to tap · system map
Source, treatment, and distribution for Oshawa from municipal and provincial water records. Open the animated map for the full watershed-to-tap diagram — no nested topic navigation here.
Permits, tax, internet, radon, hazards, drinking water, and sports rankings where a CHL hometown applies.
Oshawa sits at City Score rank #136 with a standing of 52%, from 7 of 8 open-data pillars (tax, construction, connectivity, indoor air, water, seismic hazard, growth, safety). Missing pillars score at median standing so thin coverage cannot inflate the rank. Dropping 84 places versus 2022 (#52 → #136).
Latest owned placements: building permit value rank #24 of 25 (2025); indoor radon rank #253 of 327 at 63 Bq/m³ survey mean; residential mill rate rank #20 of 57 (15.24 mill rate). Full tables and method notes live on each study edition; atlas readings for the same slug open from the topic buttons.
Against the national corpus, Oshawa carries a City Score standing of 52% (rank #136 of 343) with 7 of 8 pillars observed. That sits 0 points below the Ontario peer average across 123 ranked cities. Within Ontario, Oshawa ranks #66 of 123 on City Score.
The strongest signal in the current chart is population growth (standing 90%, rank #36 of 343, +2.8% annual growth). The weakest observed pillar is building permit value (standing 8%, rank #24 of 25).
Drinking-water hardness on the water atlas reads 125 mg/L as CaCO₃ for Oshawa. Compare that figure to the hardness pillar on the chart and to the national hardness guide on the hub.
Arena loadout
Arena rank #136 of 343
7/8 pillars · main XP bar
Pillar avg · hardness #250
Rank #24
Rank #104
Rank #253
Rank #118
Rank #20
Oshawa pillar standing
Eight equal-weight City Score pillars, 2025 panel year.
Source: OpenStats composite / study editions
City Score standing trend
Standing percentage by panel year (higher is better).
Years: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
Source: OpenStats composite timeseries
Achievements
Published residential mill-rate context for Oshawa.
Primary waterfront park with beach access, pavilion space, and easy links to the Waterfront Trail. The default answer when someone says
Wetland reserve with boardwalks and lookouts tied by trail to Ed Broadbent Waterfront Park and McLaughlin Bay. Quieter than the beach,
The City of Oshawa waterfront page says the name translates to where we must leave our canoes.
Where Oshawa sits in published building-permit figures for July 2026.
Older hometown notes stay on the desk archive (noindex) — this section shows recent highlights only.
Oshawa's municipal waterfront page still leads with a place-name translation: where we must leave our canoes. The shoreline that follows is busy in a practical way. Lakeview Park is the big draw, with beach, Jubilee Pavilion, and the Oshawa Museum's Henry House nearby. Ed Broadbent Waterfront Park adds an amphitheatre and a pedestrian bridge over Oshawa Creek toward Second Marsh and the Joseph Kolodzie Oshawa Creek Bike Path. The Lake Ontario Waterfront Trail ties the pieces together, and paid weekend parking from May through October is part of the local choreography.
Automotive heritage is not museum talk alone. The Canadian Automotive Museum occupies a restored 1920s dealership on Simcoe Street South and frames itself as a keeper of Canadian cars and Oshawa's industrial legacy. In Memorial Park, the McLaughlin Bandshell was a 1942 gift from R.S. McLaughlin, founder of General Motors Canada, built so the Oshawa Civic Band had a proper stage. The Robert McLaughlin Gallery and Ontario Tech University keep arts and campus life in the same civic conversation, a few blocks from the dealership museum.
Second Marsh and McLaughlin Bay Wildlife Reserve give birders and walkers a wetland counterweight to the beach crowds. Summer programming leans on Events in the Park, and May brings Doors Open Oshawa across heritage sites from the bandshell to the museum floor. DurhamRegion's Oshawa This Week desk covers the everyday regional beat. The hometown blend is clear: auto-city memory, creek-to-marsh trails, and a Lakeview habit that still defines weekend plans.
Drawn from City of Oshawa - Waterfront, City of Oshawa - Doors Open Oshawa, City of Oshawa, DurhamRegion.com / Oshawa.
City Score from 2016–2025 across eight open-data pillars. Individual study placements are listed in the panels below.
Each study below is its own ranking. Where a study has more than one edition for this city, the chart shows standing across those years only.
Safety · OpenStats
Statistics Canada does not publish a police-service Crime Severity Index that OpenStats can match to Oshawa without copying a province, CMA, or another city. The safety pillar scores at median standing (50%) on City Score, the same rule used for other missing pillars.
Connectivity · OpenStats
OpenStats
Cities ranked by household-weighted maximum advertised download (Mbps) from ISED National Broadband Data hex ISP rows, with hex-to-city assignment by population-weighted gravity. The headline 2025 score is the dwelling-weighted mean of per-hex technology ceilings (fibre and cable at 1 Gbps, DSL lower). Household-weighted 50/10 availability (%) is stored on atlas rows as avail_5010_pct. Earlier panel years backcast along a national speed curve with city-specific fiber and availability paths.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Construction · OpenStats
OpenStats
Cities ranked by calendar-year municipal building permit value per resident (total permit dollars divided by the OpenStats population field). Permit totals use verified municipality-grain rows (Statistics Canada CSD or equivalent municipal open data). Population uses Statistics Canada Census 2021 (tables 98-10-0006-01, 98-10-0002-01). Cities without a verified municipal permit series are unplaced; City Score uses median standing on the construction pillar.
Single edition · 2025
Only one published edition places Oshawa in this study so far. Open the edition for method notes and the full table.
Composite · OpenStats
OpenStats
Dimensional average of OpenStats open-data pillars for each panel year 2016-2025: tax, construction, connectivity, indoor air, water, seismic hazard, population growth, and crime severity. Each series is scored 0-1 within its edition; series in the same pillar are averaged, then all eight pillars are averaged with equal weight. Missing pillars score at median standing (0.5). Crime severity uses StatCan police-service CSI only (Tables 35-10-0026-01 and 35-10-0063-01); cities without a police-service match take median standing on the safety pillar. Growth uses StatCan CSD estimates; construction uses verified municipal building-permit value per resident (population field on each city record, 2021 Census vintage); mill rates and broadband use live rows plus documented year-varying estimates where needed. Radon, water, and PGA may be survey/model vintages carried forward and are flagged when static for more than two years. External commercial livability lists are never inputs.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Water · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by municipal drinking-water hardness (mg/L as CaCO₃). Hardness changes slowly; the atlas vintage is carried across panel years and flagged when static for more than two years.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Water · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by reported lead (µg/L) on the OpenStats water atlas. Carried across panel years until annual municipal report panels are ingested.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Health · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by Health Canada survey mean indoor radon (Bq/m³). Rank 1 is the highest mean. Decade panel years without a new survey carry the CMA survey vintage forward; they are not annual retests.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Growth · OpenStats
OpenStats
Cities ranked by year-over-year population growth from Statistics Canada annual CSD estimates (Table 17-10-0155-01). Rank 1 is fastest growth. A few places without a clean CSD match use a provincial-path estimate anchored to seed population.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Property tax · OpenStats
OpenStats
Municipalities ranked by residential mill rate (education levies are shown on property-tax pages but not added here). Rank 1 is the highest rate. Atlas seed and published municipal rows anchor the panel; off-panel tax years (e.g. 2026) carry across 2016–2025; remaining gaps follow provincial paths.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Hazards · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by NRCan peak ground acceleration (higher = stronger shaking hazard). Rank 1 is highest PGA. The seismic model is multi-year; values are carried across the City Score panel and flagged as static until NRCan publishes a new generation.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Livability
MoneySense
Annual composite ranking of Canadian municipalities on economy, housing, crime, health, and weather.
4 editions · 2014–2018
Distinctive local notes and places, each linked to its source.
The City of Oshawa waterfront page says the name translates to where we must leave our canoes.
The Canadian Automotive Museum opened in a restored 1920s dealership and was founded in 1962.
Second Marsh is a 123-hectare provincially significant wetland in southeast Oshawa.
Oshawa's Waterfront Trail segment is part of the nearly 900-kilometre Lake Ontario route.
Primary waterfront park with beach access, pavilion space, and easy links to the Waterfront Trail. The default answer when someone says they are heading to the lake.
Downtown museum of Canadian cars in a restored dealership building. A direct line to the industrial story that still shapes how Oshawa talks about itself.
Wetland reserve with boardwalks and lookouts tied by trail to Ed Broadbent Waterfront Park and McLaughlin Bay. Quieter than the beach, and just as local.
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