Montreal

Bilingual, cheap by North American standards and genuinely enjoyable. The festival calendar and the food carry the year. Winters are long and hard in a way that has to be planned for rather than endured. The city is walkable and well served by its metro, apartments are large for the money, and student life is spread through neighbourhoods instead of gathered onto a campus.

The lowest total cost of any North American option here: tuition at the English-language universities is below the national average for international students and rents are far under Toronto's or Vancouver's. Work during study is permitted, and the province runs its own scholarships and its own selection programme, which together add routes that don't exist elsewhere in Canada.Described in shape rather than figures on purpose: rents and salaries move every year and we cannot keep numbers true, but what is expensive and what quietly eats income stays true for far longer.

You can study and socialise in English and the two big universities are fully English-speaking, but Quebec's immigration route asks for French and employers outside the research and technology bubble expect it. Treat French as the price of staying rather than the price of arriving.