There’s no doubt that Canada is a constantly changing melting pot of people and cultures.
Throughout its 150 year history, the landscape of our great nation has changed in many different ways and a pair of videos from Statistics Canada showcase that.
The first shows how the population numbers have changed over time based on results from the 2016 census.
It talks about how Canada is now home to 35.2 million people, which is 10 times the population from shortly after confederation in 1871.
Back then, 3.5 million people lived in Canada and they were almost entirely located in the four founding provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
The first census to report over 10 million people living in Canada came in 1931, which was also the first census to ask Canadians if they owned a household appliance.
The baby boom helped Canada reach 20 million people by 1966 and increased immigration helped the nation to 30 million people in 2001.
It’s predicted that Canada will reach 40 million people in 2031.
Canada’s annual rate of population growth in the last 15 years remains the highest amongst all G7 countries at an even 1%.
The second video highlights a number of facts about urbanization in Canada and how the landscape of Canadian living has changed in the past 150 years.
Out of the country’s current 35.2 million people, 83% of people live in metropolitan areas with more than 12 million of those people being in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver.
This has changed significantly since that first census in 1871, when Montréal was Canada’s biggest city at 107,000.
Montreal was also the first area in Canada to reach 1,000,000 people, which happened in 1941.
Toronto finally took over as the country’s largest city in 1976 and never looked back.
Cities in the west were sparsely populated at the turn of the 20th century, but are now the fastest growing areas in Canada.
For example, Calgary had a population of 4,000 people in 1901, but in 2016 it’s population was all the way up to 1,400,000.
To find out more information on the 2016 census, visit the Statistics Canada website.
