Day 9: Urban-rural

Every municipality in Canada, 5,161 of them, shaded by how many of its workers commute into a city. 83.9% of Canadians live in a city, on 4.3% of the land.

commute.json

Loading 5,161 municipalities

Show or hide

Shares of Canadians. Click a municipality.

Magenta is the city: the 1,007 municipalities inside a census metropolitan area or census agglomeration, Statistics Canada's urban regions built around a core of 10,000 people or more. They hold 83.9% of Canadians on 4.3% of the land. Outside them, Statistics Canada sorts every municipality by the share of its workers who commute to a city core, and the magenta fades with it: strong pull is 30% or more, moderate is 5% to 30%, weak is under 5%, and no pull means no commuters at all.

Follow the fade outward. Around Toronto, Montréal and Calgary the strong band is wide. Haldimand County, Ontario, with 49,216 people, is the largest municipality outside a city that still sends at least 30% of its workers into one. Further out the steps thin into weak and none. Newfoundland and Labrador has the smallest share of its people in a city of any province, 53%; Ontario and British Columbia have 90% each.

The palest band, no pull, holds 213,694 people, 0.6% of Canadians, on 14.0% of the land. 577 of its 1,274 municipalities are reserves, and its four largest communities are First Nations and Inuit villages far from any city: St. Theresa Point and Garden Hill in northern Manitoba, Fox Lake 162 in northern Alberta and Puvirnituq in Nunavik.

Grey is the territories outside Whitehorse and Yellowknife: 39.0% of Canada's land and 65,907 people, which Statistics Canada does not classify by commuting. Nunavut has no city at all, so all of it is grey. A class covers a whole municipality, so a few magenta blocks are far larger than any town: Wood Buffalo, the municipality around Fort McMurray, is 60,844 km², and all of it counts as city. Click a municipality for its class, its population and its land area.

How it's made

One basemap and one layer. This is the whole map, minus the legend.

import { createMap } from '@unmap/sdk'

// commute.json: every census subdivision with its 2021 Statistical Area Classification, from
// Statistics Canada's Geographic Attribute File, on the cartographic boundaries simplified with
// shapely.coverage_simplify so neighbours keep one shared edge.
// c: 0 city (CMA or CA), 1 strong, 2 moderate, 3 weak, 4 no metropolitan influence, 5 territories
const csds = await fetch('/commute.geojson').then((r) => r.json())

const map = createMap({ key: 'um_pk_live_...', container: '#map', style: 'muted' })

map.on('load', () => {
  map.addSource('csds', { type: 'geojson', data: csds })
  const labels = map.getStyle().layers.find((l) => l.type === 'symbol').id
  map.addLayer({
    id: 'csds',
    type: 'fill',
    source: 'csds',
    paint: {
      // The city in magenta, fading toward the ground as fewer workers commute into one.
      'fill-color': ['match', ['get', 'c'],
        0, '#FF3E9A', 1, '#C43A80', 2, '#8A3266', 3, '#56294A', 4, '#33203A', '#24323A'],
      'fill-opacity': 0.9,
    },
  }, labels) // under the place names
  map.addLayer({ id: 'edges', type: 'line', source: 'csds',
    paint: { 'line-color': '#0C1418', 'line-width': 0.5 } }, labels)
})

A census subdivision is Statistics Canada's unit for a municipality, a reserve or an unorganized area. Each one carries its 2021 Statistical Area Classification in the census Geographic Attribute File, set from census commuting: where residents with a job said they usually work. Population and land area are summed from the file's 2021 census blocks, so they add up to Canada's 36,991,981 people and 8,788,703 km² of land. Population is zero where the census published no count, which includes reserves it could not fully enumerate in 2021. The boundaries are the cartographic boundary file, clipped to the shore, simplified to about 400 m as one coverage so neighbours keep a shared edge, with islands under 4 km² left out. The classes measure the trip to work and nothing else: not shopping, school or a visit to a doctor, and a person who works from home makes no commute at all. A municipality has one class for everyone in it, so a large rural one with a town at one end reads the same across its whole area.

Data

Classification, population and boundaries: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census, Geographic Attribute File and census subdivision cartographic boundary file. Used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence.

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