What Oakville's eighth investment ranking actually measures

What happened

The Town of Oakville has been named among Canada's top 20 regions for investment for the eighth consecutive year, on the Canada's Best Locations list published by Site Selection, an international business magazine. The Town announced the result on 1 September 2026.

In the year the ranking covers, 1 June 2025 to 31 May 2026, the Town names four new company arrivals: Laurentis Energy Partners, Miura Canada, AFX Mixing and Pumping Technologies, and BorderWorx.

What the ranking counts

This is the part worth reading, because the name of the list invites a broader reading than the method supports.

The rankings are determined from corporate end-user facility project data in Site Selection's own Conway Projects Database, which tracks facility projects against a set of criteria. Project activity, capital investment and job creation from qualifying projects are then evaluated both overall and per capita.

• It counts facility projects: a company building, expanding or opening somewhere.
• It weighs the capital invested and the jobs created by those projects.
• It normalises by population, which is how a town of Oakville's size places against a large city.

What it does not measure is equally worth stating. It is not an assessment of business costs, commercial rents, tax competitiveness, workforce availability, commute times or quality of life. A place can rank well on this list in a year when several large projects happen to land, and less well in a year when they do not.

The projects behind it

The largest single item the Town points to is in advanced manufacturing. In April 2026 the Government of Canada announced a $23 million investment toward a $70 million Siemens Canada project to scale up its global artificial intelligence manufacturing research and development centre for battery production in Oakville. The Town describes that project as part of a broader $150 million Siemens investment.

Why it matters

Rankings of this kind are usually reported as a verdict and are better read as a record. What the list actually shows is that qualifying facility projects have kept arriving in Oakville for eight years, at a rate that holds up when divided by the town's population.

That has a direct bearing on other things this publication follows. Facility projects need employment land, and Oakville's supply of it is finite and under pressure from two directions at once: Council rezoned an employment site beside Bronte GO Station for about 1,191 homes in August, and in the same month froze data centre applications across every employment designation in town for a year while it studies how to regulate them.