Moosomin named one of top 5 places to live in Saskatchewan
March 21, 2023, 1:28 pm
Sierra D'Souza Butts and Kevin Weedmark
Sam Mattie created a video featuring his opinion of the top five places to live in Saskatchewan, which includes Moosomin at number five.
Three of the top five are in southeast Saskatchewan. Mattie includes certain stats in his videos, including crime rates, average incomes and housing costs, which explains why southeast Saskatchewan communities ranked so high.
Kevin Weedmark and Sierra D’Souza Butts reached out to Mattie to ask him about the videos.
First of all, how did Moosomin make the list of The Top 5 Places to Live in Saskatchewan?
So it’s kind of funny. I go to school in Nova Scotia and my first year I met some friends that I live with now in my fourth year. One of my roommates is actually from Manor. In 2021 we drove from Nova Scotia out west with one of our other roommates who’s from Alberta. So I offered to come out with them to help them with the driving and my friend from Manor said “Well, when you come through you’ve gotta stop at our place and look at the farm.” So we did and we visited the farm and then we booked a hotel in Moosomin. We stayed at the Best Western, ate supper and went out a little. It’s just such a nice, small town. At that time I was just sort of getting into making the videos and talking about places and I took a lot of pictures, footage and all that stuff.
I knew that when I got around to making a video about Saskatchewan that Moosomin was one hundred per cent going to be on the list. It was kind of just like a fluke because we were looking for a town that had a Best Western because I had points built up for free nights, so I was looking for one that was somewhat close. It’s kind of just random how it happened but I’m glad we stopped.
We ate supper at The Red Barn and we were only there a night but it was a lot of fun—it was definitely one of the highlights of our trip.
So have you done a lot of travelling around Canada?
Yeah, so I’ve actually been to every single province and one of the territories, I’ve been to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. I haven’t done much in British Columbia because one of my roommates, he’s from the Banff area so we just drove into B.C. a little bit. I can say that I’ve been there and visited but I haven’t been to Vancouver or Victoria. I’m really hoping to get there soon.
How did you start this whole thing and why are you doing these travel videos?
I’m just really interested in geography and travelling is my favourite thing to do in the world. I played hockey growing up and you do a lot of travelling for tournaments and stuff so that’s where I started to get the urge to travel. Ever since I stopped playing hockey I kind of wanted to find a new pastime, and with my roommates here we’re all really into the whole travel/geography/history thing, so I figured that we might as well start talking about it.
The first two videos that I made were pretty much back to back. One was on the U.S. State of Arkansas and the other one was about Quebec. When you’re starting out you have no viewers or anything like that, so it’s kind of just a matter of luck that they get found. So I kind of just made them and then left them for a couple of months and then it was actually when I was on the road trip out west, once I made it to my roommate’s place in Alberta, I hadn’t been on in a couple of weeks and I went on to check things and my notifications just blew up.
My two videos had around 10,000 views a piece and I was just getting comment after comment after comment. Then the algorithm on YouTube swings it to the rest of the videos and then I started to get a little more consistent with it.
It’s been a bit hard over the last couple of years to stay on top of it, especially with school and I work full-time during the summer, so I haven’t been necessarily as consistent as I would like to be with it. But it’s just been really interesting to watch them.
For whatever reason my top viewed video is the one on New Brunswick and it’s got over 150,000 views now—it’s kind of insane. I maybe spent 45 minutes putting it together. I remember making it and it was between exams one day and I had some free time so I thought I’d throw it together and sure enough it’s my top viewed video.
I don’t do it for the views or anything, I just like talking about places and sharing what other people think or different opinions. I’ll put top five from a certain state or province and then you get people saying, “What about this place?” or “I can’t believe you didn’t put that place!” It’s pretty fun and just interesting to debate with people who put their input in because everyone has been to different places, lived in different places and had different experiences—that’s probably my favourite part of it honestly.
Do you plan to keep going with this? Do you plan to create more of these?
Yeah, so I have a bunch of videos that are already scripted and some of them are already recorded but I just haven’t gotten around to edit them because editing is the most time consuming part of it by far. During the school year it’s really tough to find the time to put the whole thing together because what I like to do is I like to do them all sort of in one go instead of record, have a bunch queued up and then going through and editing. I prefer to just script, record, edit and then upload all of them at once so I can stay focused on the same one. But it’s a good three or four hours to get one done so once school is over in May I’ll probably get back into it because I don’t start back to school until September. So my goal is to focus on it a lot more and have a bunch lined up and get more consistent with it.
Have you thought of coming out to Moosomin this summer and doing a follow up?
Yeah, well you know what, my roommate’s dad lives in the Manor area but his mom lives in Miniota, Manitoba and I’m flying out to Winnipeg in July, we’re going to be there for the bonspiel and then I’m going to drive to Calgary and fly home from there. So we’ll probably be passing through.
And where is home for you?
I’m from a small town about 45 minutes west of Montreal.
In terms of when you go to different places, what is something that sparks out to you when you’re with your friends? What do you guys look for most in a community?
It kind of depends on the place we’re going to. I don’t really care about the size of the place that we’re going to—I just like a nice downtown where you can walk around from your hotel or wherever you’re staying. It’s based on what you have for restaurants, bars and just the overall vibe of a certain place. When I make trips to bigger areas I sort of base it off of whether I would be able to go to a sports game in the place. Like a couple of weeks ago we had our spring break for school and I based the whole thing on going to an NHL game. So I got to three NHL games in a week and that was fun. But in terms of when I’m doing more of a road trip, in between the city stops I like doing small towns. Last summer I flew to South Dakota and drove across the U.S. to come back to Nova Scotia for the start of school, and there’s this one little town that we stayed at in Illinois called Nashville, Illinois and it had like 2,500 people. It was about 45 minutes to St. Louis and that was one of the most fun nights we had on the trip. You just get to experience a small town that most people have never heard of and you get to learn about how people live there, what it’s like and what the local scene is like. That’s one of my favourite parts of travelling—getting to see all of the different places along the way, and it’s not necessarily all about going to the big cities and seeing the big things. It’s about how the small towns all have something to offer.
In your list of Saskatchewan, you were mentioning crime rates, income rates and house prices. Do some of the stats go into the mix in picking your top five?
Yeah, absolutely. I don’t want to make them purely statistical because I don’t think that’s necessarily the best way to go about rating somewhere because you could have a place that has above average crime but it’s just something like petty theft. That doesn’t represent what the town is like—and everywhere you go there’s good and bad. But at the same time when you’re making a video and you’re ranking something from best to worst or worst to best or just top five, if you were to do one that has some sort of statistical representation of what it would be like to live there or visit, and when I look at housing or crime, those are just statistics that are important to me if I was looking for somewhere to move. They’re just factors to consider. Whenever I’m looking at a place, even if it’s just like I visit a place and I get curious, even if I have no interest in moving there, I’m always curious about what a house goes for or an apartment, like what rent is in the place. I just use metrics that I would find useful or would be interested in when learning about a new place.
A lot of people who have seen your video have commented on the fact that three of the top five were in Southeast Saskatchewan.
Yeah, it’s a really cool region of the province. My roommate’s farm is near Parkman and so we went to Kenosee Lake and that area is just beautiful.
That’s not what you think of when someone talks about Saskatchewan—that flat, boring, nothing. There is so much more than that. So then we went to Regina, came down and went to the Corner Gas set. I was a huge Corner Gas fan growing up—loved that show.
Just so you know, if you didn’t grow up in rural Saskatchewan, that’s really what it’s like. Corner Gas pretty much captured it exactly.
I remember that I started watching that show probably younger than I should have been. I grew up with it. I had shirts and hats. My aunt and uncle did a cross-country trip once and they brought me back a book from the souvenir store when it was still up. It was just a really cool drive and it’s a really interesting part of the province because a lot of people, even a lot Canadians, they don’t know a lot about the province. It’s probably one of the least known provinces that we have and the people that do know think of Regina, Saskatoon, maybe Moose Jaw and Swift Current. Then they probably have heard of the Battlefords for being crime ridden or whatever, but that’s pretty much it.
There’s just so much more to it and that’s another thing that I try to share when making the content.
A lot of people probably haven’t heard of half of the places that I’ve talked about in any video I make. So I like to share and expand people’s view that this place is more than just the two biggest cities or the places that get a bad reputation.
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