demographics
04. demographics
Population growth in Canada’s urban communities continues to outpace change in non-urban areas; creative land use decisions are required to accommodate it.
GROWTH IN CITIES AND TOWNS, WHILE RURAL SHARES GO DOWN
Modern day community planners would be pleased to know that while Canada’s population is growing faster than it ever has before, it is doing so largely within the confines of existing urban communities. This has the effect of mitigating a range of negative environmental impacts associated with growth, while also forcing cities to think more deeply about how people and homes are organized within their borders. In considering spatial growth patterns more specifically, 96% of the population additions nation-wide between 2017 and 2018 were realized within census metropolitan areas (groups of adjacent municipalities centred on a core of at least 100,000 people) or census agglomerations (urban areas with a core population of at least 10,000 people).
This is a greater share than the existing 84% of Canadians who lived in urban areas in 2018. BC has the second-highest provincial share of residents living inurban communities, at 89%, with 91% of recent year-over-year growth also being realized here. Expect this trend to further entrench itself over the coming years, with increasing shares of growth accruing to urban communities. In some provinces—including Saskatchewan and the group of Atlantic provinces— urban areas are already accounting for more than 100% of total growth, meaning rural communities in those parts of the country are beginning to shrink in their population counts.
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