Statistics Canada Reports II

[someone123]

Originally Posted by ue

A funny thing about Winnipeg is that it is basically flat as a pancake and yet is harder to get around than Edmonton. Winnipeggers have a tendency to kneecap themselves. The Downtown Rail Yards are a barrier for the North End in a similar way that the North Shore is cut off naturally from Vancouver. There are huge river-facing sections of the city essentially cut off from each other because despite not having Calgary's hills, Edmonton's valleys, or Vancouver's water, Winnipeg just doesn't build bridges, especially if it isn't a highway or for accessing downtown. Winnipeg isn't as polycentric as Edmonton, but it is more so than Calgary, and a lot of its road network comprises of mega-stroads funnelling people from their area of the city either towards the core or the country while the neighbourhood streets don't talk to each other across these stroads because Winnipeg was a dozen different cities that didn't talk to each other fully until 1972.

Canada tends to be pretty bad for infrastructure like this in general. We will put up with horrible traffic snarls for decades instead of building small-ish bridges that would irk 20 homeowners. This is one of those ways in which I think Canada can actually be pretty unfair and unequal.

[DavidK93]

Originally Posted by ue

What I was suggesting more was that because Winnipeg and Vancouver have a similar high-quality old urbanism in their own ways, if there was ever an alternate reality where Winnipeg was able to boom to the size of Vancouver, it could have the potential to rival it in terms of urban offerings and vibrancy. It wouldn't be exactly like Vancouver (probably more like a halfway between Chicago and Minneapolis if we're being honest with more Canadian-style urbanism) but it could rival it in its own way if that ever happened.

TBH, I don't know about that. It would be a large cool city of course, but Vancouver being a port city automatically changes the feel. The growth of the core radiating away from the water and constrained by geography forced the core to be more dense.

Vancouver's biggest growth years have been in recent decades after the war, and if Winnipeg being a prairie city boomed during those years it would be mostly suburban growth like Calgary or Edmonton.
Calgary's made good strides, but it's having to make up for decades of that kind of growth. Winnipeg could have ended up similar to a Vancouver, but it could also have ended up like an Edmonton.

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by giallo

I appreciate the nuanced take on your hometown. Discussions would get pretty boring on this page if all we did was circle-jerk and naval-gaze cities.

I visited downtown Edmonton back in June 2024, and I was pretty shocked by how quiet it was on a Thursday afternoon. I do feel like it has loads of potential, but the work that needs to be done is vast.

Downtown Edmonton and what can be called "inner city" does indeed need a ton of work, however it's certainly not an impossible feat, particularly when a city (city limits not Metro) has been growing at roughly 25,000/yr for 20 years and will continue to grow rapidly for the foreseeable future.
Edmonton will also get to a point where it's not that feasible to keep sprawling outwards and focus even more effort on infill and densification of the inner city areas.

comments like

Originally Posted by ssiguy

I know this sounds really negative but in some ways I think Edmonton's downtown is beyond redemption.

force me to come out of the woodwork and reply. Comments like these are hyperbolic doomerism like the shite that gets traction on reddit lol


I've been to Edmonton quite a few times when I lived in Calgary and met educated, really well rounded, interesting folks there. I went to the AGA-Art Gallery of Alberta when it was new. My Parisian friends were impressed with that art museum and the size of Edmonton's downtown LRT "subway" underground stations. My one friend commented "the stations are so huge" and I replied "Edmonton in the 1970s was thinking way ahead, possibly to a city of 2-3 million people decades in the future". The original line allows for up to 5-car trains. Downtown Calgary is limited to 4-car CTrains because that's the max length the stations can handle on the surface.

I'm from the Great Lakes rust belt. I've watched Hamilton go from the butt of Ontarian jokes transforming into a city where they keep building 30-34 storey residential or mixed-use highrises with hundreds of units each and repopulating the inner city. Where creative Toronto restaurateurs are opening bars and restaurants along with locals that want more interesting places to go. And Torontonians can still afford to own a home.

I've watched cities like Detroit, Buffalo, and others that were looked at continent-wide as "left for dead" essentially come back from life support and start growing again. If their downtowns weren't beyond redemption when they lost hundreds of thousands of people (Detroit lost 1.2 Million people, or an entire Buffalo MSA in population FFS) than a rapidly growing Edmonton is certainly not too far gone.

Particularly in a rapidly growing Canadian city that is expanding its LRT network and bike lane network at the same time, while infilling low density SFH lots with 3,4,6,8 unit multiplexes.

Edmonton is a city in transition. It deserves critiquing, however hyper criticism to the point of ridiculous hyperbole like ssiguy's post is not helpful. Doomer mentality can become a self fulfilling prophecy. I saw this first hand in Buffalo before the ongoing revitalization that started around 2007-2008-ish.
I'm confident there are many passionate young Edmontonians actively working to make Edmonton a more liveable, bikeable and transit accessible city, a better city. These things take time to get implemented.

I understand that ue felt like he/she/they had to leave, but it's natural to get jaded on one's hometown and want to leave and live in other cities and have new experiences, meet and befriend new people.

[WayneShuster]

Honestly, I have enjoyed ue's commentary. I feel he provides a balanced view on the realities of the cities he calls/has called home instead of pointless one-sided boosterism or bashing, to the point where I wish he would partake in the Winnipeg threads more

[someone123]

Originally Posted by WayneShuster

Honestly, I have enjoyed ue's commentary. I feel he provides a balanced view on the realities of the cities he calls/has called home instead of pointless one-sided boosterism or bashing, to the point where I wish he would partake in the Winnipeg threads more

I agree. People are often defensive when discussion departs from a pretty narrow predictable track. SSP has lost a lot of its discussion mojo, in part due to the nature of the ageing internet, but also probably because posting interesting and insightful stuff, or sometimes even things you can see out your own window, is nowhere near the path of least resistance on here. Sometimes somebody can say something you don't like about your city (or their city) and it's not a cause for hyperventilation or moderation. And even if you don't agree, it could be that they actually have gone traveled or live somewhere and have a different opinion.

There seem to be trends too. There was Toronto boosterism at one point that peaked and has dropped. BC and AB tend to have a pretty high boosterism coefficient while places like Winnipeg or Ottawa tend to be lower. I've had discussions with people living here about how some people make aspects of BC a part of their personal identity in a way I haven't run into so much in other places. Or sometimes you see positive identity factors in one place while in another people identify with negative factors (we are tough).

[ue]

Originally Posted by Wigs

Downtown Edmonton and what can be called "inner city" does indeed need a ton of work, however it's certainly not an impossible feat, particularly when a city (city limits not Metro) has been growing at roughly 25,000/yr for 20 years and will continue to grow rapidly for the foreseeable future.

You really love talking about Edmonton's growth as if nobody knows Edmonton has been growing fairly steady. Do you think if you keep saying it, it will refute my point or something? Because the growth is happening, and downtown is more dead than a decade ago, Whyte Ave is stagnant, 124th Street is a generations-long failure to launch at this point. Transit is getting better but is still easily the worst of the big 6.

Edmonton will also get to a point where it's not that feasible to keep sprawling outwards and focus even more effort on infill and densification of the inner city areas.

As we've been discussing, Edmonton is already excellent at infill and densification. The city isn't doing the Corbusian stuff that gets Vaughan developers off though.

I've been to Edmonton quite a few times when I lived in Calgary and met educated, really well rounded, interesting folks there. I went to the AGA-Art Gallery of Alberta when it was new.

For the record, I maintain that the AGA was good when it was new. It hasn't had the same funding paradigm since the early 2010s, and its quality has declined IMO.

My Parisian friends were impressed with that art museum and the size of Edmonton's downtown LRT "subway" underground stations. My one friend commented "the stations are so huge" and I replied "Edmonton in the 1970s was thinking way ahead, possibly to a city of 2-3 million people decades in the future". The original line allows for up to 5-car trains. Downtown Calgary is limited to 4-car CTrains because that's the max length the stations can handle on the surface.

A lot of people will come to Edmonton for a weekend and be pleasantly surprised because indeed it isn't as bad as people often make it out to be. But try leading a normal life on ETS for 10 years, then get back to me. Also, if you actually read my posts, I already talked about the ways in which Edmonton's LRT excels compared to the CTrain.

I'm from the Great Lakes rust belt. I've watched Hamilton go from the butt of Ontarian jokes transforming into a city where they keep building 30-34 storey residential or mixed-use highrises with hundreds of units each and repopulating the inner city. Where creative Toronto restaurateurs are opening bars and restaurants along with locals that want more interesting places to go. And Torontonians can still afford to own a home.

I've watched cities like Detroit, Buffalo, and others that were looked at continent-wide as "left for dead" essentially come back from life support and start growing again. If their downtowns weren't beyond redemption when they lost hundreds of thousands of people (Detroit lost 1.2 Million people, or an entire Buffalo MSA in population FFS) than a rapidly growing Edmonton is certainly not too far gone.

Hamilton is in a similar boat to Winnipeg in that it is an older city with a lot of potential. The difference is Edmonton is a newer city with a lot of potential but that newness changes the scope of what kind of city it will be, especially when its culture isn't interested in doing a Calgary.

Detroit has a massive Diego Rivera mural. Edmonton gets Banksy reprints in plastic IKEA frames at the AGA with typos in the description. Detroit is such a loaded city in urbanism discussions but it more more hardened than any Canadian city could manage sans maybe Montreal and, like Winnipeg, like Hamilton, but UNLIKE Edmonton, it has that historic foundation.

I understand that ue felt like he/she/they had to leave, but it's natural to get jaded on one's hometown and want to leave and live in other cities and have new experiences, meet and befriend new people.

Seeing as you don't know me, I don't think you can reduce my life's experiences in a city down to an easy-to-digest sentence like this.

[ue]

Originally Posted by someone123

But if it were not for Canada and the US being two separate countries, would it be a natural place to ship products from one side of the continent to the other? I think you need the Canada-US border to invest much in infrastructure above Lake Superior, and there isn't much north of Winnipeg.

The Red River Settlement, Upper and Lower Fort Garry, etc all predate Confederation. It's hard to say whether Winnipeg would be where its at now without the US-Canada divide, much like you could say with Toronto or Ottawa. But I do think if there was never a split there still would be a city of significance where Winnipeg is. Whether that is significant in the way that Fargo is for North Dakota or significant in the way that Minneapolis is to the Upper Midwest or Chicago is to America... I don't know.

Originally Posted by someone123

Canada tends to be pretty bad for infrastructure like this in general. We will put up with horrible traffic snarls for decades instead of building small-ish bridges that would irk 20 homeowners. This is one of those ways in which I think Canada can actually be pretty unfair and unequal.

I agree. This is actually an area that Edmonton bucks the Canadian trend in a positive sense, much like on the missing middle front. There are issues for sure, but you don't build a city of engineers without making an efficient transportation grid to help them get around.

Winnipeg is a comically bad example of the Canadian tendency to underbuild infrastructure. I get why the Malahat snarls to one lane in each direction heading out of Victoria even if it's nuts. I understood the tolls between Dartmouth and Halifax. Calgary has all those hills. Hamilton has a cliff-like fault line running through it. Winnipeg is flat as a pancake, its only hills are artificial (usually ex-landfills), and the only real natural barriers are rivers and swamps. And yet... Edmonton and Calgary are better biking cities, despite the harder terrain. Whole swaths of the city don't even have a pedestrian bridge between them. Winnipeg loves building pedestrian bridges only when they are redundant (i.e. next to a road bridge with a sidewalk). Edmonton stitches areas together better.

[ue]

Originally Posted by WayneShuster

Honestly, I have enjoyed ue's commentary. I feel he provides a balanced view on the realities of the cities he calls/has called home instead of pointless one-sided boosterism or bashing, to the point where I wish he would partake in the Winnipeg threads more

To be honest, I've tried many times over the years to stop visiting SSP. The way I was treated on this website early on was not great as a young person. Why were grown professors at Western University bullying 16 year olds? Why were urban planners from a 1978 vintage laughing at me for not getting adult jokes when I was here to discuss cool new buildings going up at the time in Calgary because the stuff was lacking in Edmonton no matter how much we told ourselves the ICON Condos would put us on the map? This is rhetorical and I don't expect you or anyone to have an answer. I've tried following this stuff on social media but I have been using SSP since I was in junior high and I find the forum format so much better for following urbanism and architecture news, especially since forums haven't been commodified in the same way as social media to taint the discussion.

I was happy that the Edmonton forum largely decamped to SkyRise Cities but that place has declined as its grown and more divisions have emerged. And I still live in and am interested in Winnipeg, so I've kept coming here specifically to follow happenings in the Man/Sask forum. I really enjoy the insights of forumers like trueviking, 1ajs, Wpg_Guy, and many more. Sometimes, I wish the Winnipeg forum would just decamp to SRC too so that I won't be tempted back into discussions like this. It feels futile conversing with people who refuse to have a real, in-depth discussion with me and get stuck in the same knee-jerk defensiveness I was ridiculed on here for when I was doing it at a time that it made more sense in regards to emotional maturity.

This is the first time I've popped out of the woodwork since Crawford called me a slur in 2022 and I got suspended for calling him out. I thought enough distance had passed and I thought there was an opportunity for me to contribute some additional perspectives to the ongoing conversation rather than just regurgitating the same Googleable stuff.

[Wigs]

This is what you guys said about Edmonton, and why I replied:

Originally Posted by ssiguy

I know this sounds really negative but in some ways I think Edmonton's downtown is beyond redemption.

Originally Posted by ue

But Winnipeg's a real city, not what happens when you add a million people to Moncton.

[ue]

Originally Posted by Wigs

This is what you guys said about Edmonton, and why I replied:

If Montrealer Mordecai Richler can call Edmonton the boiler room of cities from a pretentious Laurentien vantage then I can call Edmonton the ghost kitchen of Canadian cities and not a real city when I am from there and am basing it on decades of experience. I'm sorry you can't see the humour in my analysis.

[Surrealplaces]

The 2026 census numbers are a ways out, but wondering if anyone has any predictions for provinces or metro areas? The numbers will no doubt be dampened due to much lower immigration numbers, and as well the census numbers are always low and then jump again in the following year's estimate numbers. I'm thinking we may even see more declines in numbers. Any guesses?

[ue]

Originally Posted by Surrealplaces

The 2026 census numbers are a ways out, but wondering if anyone has any predictions for provinces or metro areas? The numbers will no doubt be dampened due to much lower immigration numbers, and as well the census numbers are always low and then jump again in the following year's estimate numbers.

No you're right, doing this for the 50th time this year is the move and burying my pain is the SSP way.

[Surrealplaces]

Originally Posted by ue

No you're right, doing this for the 50th time this year is the move and burying my pain is the SSP way.

No better way to bury the pain than guessing games involving population stats

Any guesses for Winnipeg? I'm thinking probably still solid growth. Even though a lot of Winnipeg's growth is through immigration, they didn't have a high percentage of temporary workers, or non-permanent residents.

[Surrealplaces]

I'll throw in my predications for the main metros.

Calgary +30,000
Edmonton +28,000
Montreal +25,000
Ottawa +22,000
Vancouver +20,000
Toronto +15,000
Winnipeg +10,000
St Catherines +5,000
Quebec +5,000
Hamilton +5,000
Saskatoon +5,000
Halifax +5,00
Victoria +4,000
Regina +3,000
Kitchener Waterloo +3,000
London +2,000

[ue]

Ok! Here are my 2026 predictions:

1. Toronto, ON - 7,150,000
2. Montreal, QC - 4,600,000
3. Vancouver, BC - 3,125,000
4. Calgary, AB - 1,880,000
5. Edmonton, AB - 1,755,000
6. Ottawa, ON - 1,730,000
7. Winnipeg, MB - 960,000
8. Quebec, QC - 910,000
9. Hamilton, ON - 875,000
10. Waterloo, ON - 700,000
11. London, ON - 640,000
12. Halifax, NS - 555,000
13. Niagara, ON - 515,000
14. Oshawa, ON - 510,000
15. Windsor, ON - 490,000
16. Victoria, BC - 450,000
17. Saskatoon, SK - 3845000
18. Regina, SK - 295,000
19. Kelowna, BC - 260,000
20. Barrie, ON - 255,000
21. Sherbrooke, QC - 245,000
22. St John’s, NL - 245,000
23. Abbotsford, BC - 230,000

Enjoy!

[Changing City]

At the risk of putting Statistics Canada data into the thread, the Housing construction data for April was published last week. Somewhat related to current growth, rather than the housing starts, here's the currently under construction data for the 20 largest CMAs (in order of their 2021 population).

My observations were that the BC cities are all seeing development greater than their population ranking would suggest, as is Halifax.

Toronto 90,550
Montreal 34,410
Vancouver 61,945
Ottawa–Gatineau 21,555
Calgary 24,095
Edmonton 16,924
Quebec City 10,844
Winnipeg 8,773
Hamilton 6,994
Kitchener–Cambridge–Waterloo 7,997
London 6,738
Halifax 13,549
St. Catharines–Niagara 4,350
Windsor 1,598
Oshawa 2,760
Victoria 9,262
Saskatoon 4,042
Regina 1,781
Sherbrooke 2,040
Kelowna 4,442

There are two CMAs in the top 20 for current development that were not in the top 20 by size in 2021 (so also out-performing their ranking)

Moncton 3,467
Abbotsford 2,776

Barrie 2,030, Brantford 1,858 and Kingston 1,841 are also out-building Regina and Windsor.

[Chocolite]

Here’s mine for cities over 500K

Toronto 75,000
Vancouver 55,000
Montreal 40,00
Calgary 35,000
Ottawa 20,000
Edmonton 20,000
KW 10,000
Winnipeg 5,000
Quebec 5,000
Hamilton 5,000
London 5,000

[ZTrade]

Originally Posted by ue

Ok! Here are my 2026 predictions:

1. Toronto, ON - 7,150,000
2. Montreal, QC - 4,600,000
3. Vancouver, BC - 3,125,000
4. Calgary, AB - 1,880,000
5. Edmonton, AB - 1,755,000
6. Ottawa, ON - 1,730,000
7. Winnipeg, MB - 960,000
8. Quebec, QC - 910,000
9. Hamilton, ON - 875,000
10. Waterloo, ON - 700,000
11. London, ON - 640,000
12. Halifax, NS - 555,000
13. Niagara, ON - 515,000
14. Oshawa, ON - 510,000
15. Windsor, ON - 490,000
16. Victoria, BC - 450,000
17. Saskatoon, SK - 3845000
18. Regina, SK - 295,000
19. Kelowna, BC - 260,000
20. Barrie, ON - 255,000
21. Sherbrooke, QC - 245,000
22. St John’s, NL - 245,000
23. Abbotsford, BC - 230,000

Enjoy!

My prediction is the top 17 are all above 1 million by 2050. From 18-23, Kelowna and Barrie most likely to crack 500K imo.

[MolsonExport]

17. Saskatoon, SK - 3845000

That would make Saskatoon the third largest urban area in Canada.

[MonctonRad]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

That would make Saskatoon the third largest urban area in Canada.

????

Quoi???

I'm hoping Moncton will surpass 200,000 in the CMA this year.