Statistics Canada Reports II

[blueandgoldguy]

Originally Posted by DLLB

That was a huge and strange drop for Alberta of 55,876 between Oct 1/23 and Nov 1/23
Fault in the system, over correction?

DATE ..................... Oct 1/23 ....... Nov 1/23 .... Monthly Diff .. Yr over Yr
Ontario .............. 15,708,581 ... 15,752,905 .... 44,324 ........ 552,730
Manitoba ............. 1,458,809 .... 1,467,600 ........ 8,791 ........... 52,505
Saskatchewan .... 1,234,098 .... 1,219,709 ..... -14,389 .......... 20,689
Alberta ................ 4,802,625 .... 4,746,749 ..... -55,876 ........ 174,424
British Columbia .. 5,511,224 .... 5,571,130 ...... 59,906 ........ 217,238

ooooohhhhhh. At that rate Manitoba is growing the population may actually surpass Edmonton's and Calgary's metros in a few years.

[zahav]

Definitely seems like an error with the Alberta figure, their growth has been very elevated and that hasn't changed in the last few months. What it could be, rather than a slowdown or shrinkage from recent figures, is an adjustment because past estimates were too high at the time? So might mean it is still growing fast, but this adjustment takes into account overestimation from previous months all added at once, resulting in what looks like anemic growth?

[someone123]

At these growth rates, PEI will pass Alberta in a mere decades.

[thurmas]

Originally Posted by blueandgoldguy

ooooohhhhhh. At that rate Manitoba is growing the population may actually surpass Edmonton's and Calgary's metros in a few years.

What the hell at that rate Manitoba would be growing at over 100k per year. Maybe ex pats Manitobans are being priced out of Calgary and moving back home?

[giallo]

BC grew by 217,238 people in a 12 month period? Crazy to see. BC's population growth has always been a bit of a slow burn.

[Wigs]

Originally Posted by giallo

BC grew by 217,238 people in a 12 month period? Crazy to see. BC's population growth has always been a bit of a slow burn.

That's wild. Keep it up and that's over 2M people in a decade!

Originally Posted by thurmas

What the hell at that rate Manitoba would be growing at over 100k per year. Maybe ex pats Manitobans are being priced out of Calgary and moving back home?

Maybe Manitobans that moved not just to Alberta, but all across Canada are retiring back home.

Coming from southern Ontario or lower mainland BC they could afford an amazing house for not a high price. Coming from Calgary with their recent rapid housing price rise now too.

I'm glad to hear. I have a soft spot for Winnipeg and Manitoba in general. I want both Winnipeg and Québec City to be over 1M and continue to grow.

[Centerprovince]

Alberta is still booming, and Manitoba did not grow by over 50,000 people in the last six months. Those latest numbers are now based off the 2021 census, the previous numbers were still based on the 2016 census. So those new numbers are simply a correction. When the next population estimates are released, it will be a more accurate reflection of recent trends.

[SignalHillHiker]

URL is in the top. If they have us, they likely have all of your cities too

The website goes into excruciating detail about their methodology. And it uses StatsCan data.


www.canadiansuburbs.ca

[zoomer]

/\ pretty cool find. What’s up with it showing St. John’s with 0% Transit suburb though? Doesn’t seem right.

Victoria’s numbers are:

Active Core: 21%
Transit Suburb: 9%
Auto Suburb: 66%
Exurban: 4%

[SignalHillHiker]

I think it’s probably fair. Our only transit is the bus and, while the system is feeling the burden of a large growth in ridership, it’s still going to areas built for cars, where most people have their own.

I get off the bus every morning at the Village Mall, which is one of the main transfer hubs. There’s always a half dozen or so buses stopping at once when mine is there. No matter when I arrive in the morning or leave in the evening, almost all are only half full except the ones going to Mount Pearl and the Goulds, two of our farthest-out suburbs that are still served by the bus (most of the suburban municipalities don’t participate in funding it and aren’t covered). So if they had a proper transit one it’d be out on the fringes in his map, which doesn’t really feel right.

I would tweak the core a little, though. The smaller yellow one directly below downtown, left of the larger yellow Southside Hills, that’s definitely core. It’s far more core than the two green ones out by Memorial University along the edges of Pippy Park. So whatever the stats say, I’d be shocked is anyone could come here and not agree with switching those around.

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker

I think it’s probably fair. Our only transit is the bus and, while the system is feeling the burden of a large growth in ridership, it’s still going to areas built for cars, where most people have their own.

I get off the bus every morning at the Village Mall, which is one of the main transfer hubs. There’s always a half dozen or so buses stopping at once when mine is there. No matter when I arrive in the morning or leave in the evening, almost all are only half full except the ones going to Mount Pearl and the Goulds, two of our farthest-out suburbs that are still served by the bus (most of the suburban municipalities don’t participate in funding it and aren’t covered). So if they had a proper transit one it’d be out on the fringes in his map, which doesn’t really feel right.

I would tweak the core a little, though. The smaller yellow one directly below downtown, left of the larger yellow Southside Hills, that’s definitely core. It’s far more core than the two green ones out by Memorial University along the edges of Pippy Park. So whatever the stats say, I’d be shocked is anyone could come here and not agree with switching those around.

I see St. John's as 11 percent transit suburb, which correlates to the Censusmapper overlay of transit to work, if you compare to that.

Some of the methodology can seem a little odd. For example, when I looked at Calgary, it's active core seemed bizarrely massive, extending way northwest--but then I realized that was the U of C campus. It's not really a contiguous part of the urban core at all, but I'm sure the concentration of students and staff there do create a higher active-transport percentage. Also, active cores are defined as cores where rates of walking and biking to work are 1.5 times greater than the CMA average--so active cores aren't defined by some national baseline, but relative to each specific city overall.

So we could quibble with that. Still pretty interesting in general though.

[someone123]

If you look at the methodology they say they use both transportation modal share and census tract level density numbers in classification (didn't see them mention something like population-weighted density but maybe they do some corrections). The transportation modal share data is presumably good while the census tract level density numbers are incredibly noisy, particularly in smaller and more geographically complicated cities. You can easily find census tracts made up of some highrises, an industrial park, and then multiple square kilometers of forest or farmland.

Given the amount of data that can be easily processed now you'd think Statistics Canada could provide something more like a point cloud model of where people live and work, with a bit of randomness added for anonymization.

[niwell]

That's a really interesting dataset. One thing that popped out to me is that Toronto's "Active Core" population is actually slightly higher than Montreal's, though the latter's makes up a larger percentage of the overall population. In terms of "Transit Suburb" Toronto's is both significantly larger and makes up a higher percentage of the population, but it captures a lot of suburban tower neighbourhoods that are reliant on transit and not what we'd consider traditionally urban. Meanwhile there are some very pleasant streetcar suburb style neighbourhoods classified as "auto suburb" which assume corresponds to their wealth/corresponding lifestyle (North on Yonge, Kingsway).

[Kilgore Trout]

This is very interesting because it shows how many neighbourhoods are functionally urban as opposed to densely populated. There are definitely some surprises though. I'm wondering how on earth Ville-Émard can be classified as a "transit suburb" when most of it looks like this:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/hToyKoim9DJCsrmb7

And it has a general population density of around 100-150 people per hectare, which is similar to Toronto's west end and many "active core" parts of Montreal. But I guess it depends on transportation modal share, and being somewhat peripheral means there's just that many more people using cars compared to some very similarly built neighbourhoods elsewhere in the city.

Edit: Actually, looking at more cities I'm a bit suspicious. I would consider all of Nanaimo to be suburban, even the areas right downtown, and yet there are quite a few areas listed as "active core." I suppose a better metric for urban/suburban would be one that finds a way to include both transportation data and population density.

Edit 2: I was thinking about this today (and yes, I do somtimes walk around thinking about SSP theads) and this functions really well as an index of car dependency. Somewhere like Ville-Émard might be dense, it might have direct access to rapid transit, but something structural is preventing it from being "active urban."

[P'tit Renard]

https://torontofoundation.ca/powerofus#thefindings

[jamincan]

I'm surprised the Maritimes and Atlantic Canada are so high. They seem far more community-oriented to me, which you would think would reduce loneliness.

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by jamincan

I'm surprised the Maritimes and Atlantic Canada are so high. They seem far more community-oriented to me, which you would think would reduce loneliness.

I wondered about that too, especially because Statcan actually produces "loneliness" statistics that show people in the Atlantic region report being "always or often" or "sometimes" lonely less often than the national average, and less than in Ontario, the prairies and BC (but more than Quebec).

Ultimately it seems like a pretty nebulous, subjective thing for a survey to nail down anyway. Does loneliness mean different things to different people? Maybe to someone in a region with high connectivity and many family and social ties, loneliness is more easily triggered, whereas people in a highly mobile area, with fewer deep ties and more casual ties, are less sensitive to it (or at least have a higher threshold for what they report as "loneliness.") Do people from different culture experience or report loneliness differently, leading to different responses in more multicultural areas? All hard to say. The Statcan data also shows, with the exception of Quebec, regional results that seem to differ by barely more than a margin of error. So I'm not sure it's that meaningful.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Drybrain

I wondered about that too, especially because Statcan actually produces "loneliness" statistics that show people in the Atlantic region report being "always or often" or "sometimes" lonely less often than the national average, and less than in Ontario, the prairies and BC (but more than Quebec).

Ultimately it seems like a pretty nebulous, subjective thing for a survey to nail down anyway. Does loneliness mean different things to different people? Maybe to someone in a region with high connectivity and many family and social ties, loneliness is more easily triggered, whereas people in a highly mobile area, with fewer deep ties and more casual ties, are less sensitive to it (or at least have a higher threshold for what they report as "loneliness.") Do people from different culture experience or report loneliness differently, leading to different responses in more multicultural areas? All hard to say. The Statcan data also shows, with the exception of Quebec, regional results that seem to differ by barely more than a margin of error. So I'm not sure it's that meaningful.

Most of my family roots are in the Maritimes. I think I've mentioned before that the Maritimes are a bit of a feast or famine in terms of human contact. People are among the friendliest in Canada with strangers but forming true relationships is a lot more challenging than that friendliness would lead you to believe.

A decent-sized chunk of the population are from families who've been in the region since the 1800s and so all of their social networks are well-established and often you need a really good "in" in order to carve yourself out a spot in these circles. People aren't mean or anything - it's just force of habit to hang out with the same crowd.

I realize YMMV and a larger place like Halifax might be a bit different. But overall I have always found the Maritimes - even in the smaller cities - to trend this way.

It's admittedly a very satisfying and comfortable place to live for those who are "in" (and not saying it's that hard to achieve) but maybe not so fun for those who are left out for reasons XYZ. Or at least not really that much better than in a big allegedly impersonal city like Toronto.

[SFUVancouver]

Hamilton CMA, based on the suburbs mapping project:

Active Core: 12.3% (96,550 people) <- one of those is me!
Transit Suburb: 9.3% (72,920 people)
Auto Suburb: 72.5% (569,227 people)
Exurb: 5.9% (46,434 people)

https://www.canadiansuburbs.ca/wp-co...ilton_2021.pdf

Disappointingly, this seems pretty accurate.

[ssiguy]

Interesting that London actually has amongst the highest downtown & transit friendly ratios in the country and is tied with Montreal at 30%. Such a statistic would not play well into NJB's narrative about the city so no doubt he will ignore the stat.