[Redroom Studios]

Anyone from Niagara would tell you they have nothing to do with the GTA. People in Niagara barely (more like rarely) associate with Hamilton never mind Toronto.

i'm from Niagara and I would disagree with that. Whenever I am travelling internationally and am asked where I am from I may say either Niagara Falls or Toronto and invariably when asked to describe my part of the world I end up refering to the (Greater) Golden Horseshoe and its population of ~ 8 million.

I spend 95% + of my time in various locations throughout the GGH ... this is what defines "my world", all centered around Toronto.

 

[interchange42]

The wineries and fruit growers of Niagara are also rather GTA oriented too: they know where the bulk of their sales are coming from, and the wineries know where their visitors are coming from. Same thing at the Shaw: Niagara-on-the-Lake is not a suburb of Niagara Falls, it is a suburb of the Greater Toronto Area.

42

 

[Irishmonk]

^That's pretty much my whole point. The Golden Horseshoe or GGH or GTHNA or whatever you want to call it has, despite some begrudging holdouts, effectively become a single organic urban entity. There maybe some parts that don't directly connect to other parts but eventually they all interconnect in some fashion. I would love to see some official population numbers that reflected this.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

Niagara bone connected to the St. Catharines bone, St. Catharines bone connected to the Grimsby bone, Grimsby bone connected to the Stoney Creek bone, etc.

 

[Second_in_pie]

Toronto bone's connected to the K-W bone, K-W bone's connected to the Stratford bone, Stratford bone's connected with the London bone... London connected with Toronto?!

But the GGH really is a huge urban area. I don't think it's as Toronto-centric as something like Metro Chicago is, but all the areas are closely interlinked. I think this makes for a very interesting future for the area, especially with how much variety there is.
And as I've said before, adding the Greenbelt to the equation makes things even more interesting. Instead of swallowing up these areas in one big urban mass, they have to define themselves. The increased density gives the proper scale for increased transportation links between them, and allows all the different areas and cities to gain their own specialities and identities, and I think will end up making the region much more colourful than the likes of Chicago or even LA.
Then, with city-centres growing at the peripheries of the region, it allows other centres to grow outside the current GGH. If managed by proper growth enforcement and greenbelt laws, it could create a density chain that may end up fizzling out, but would spread to much more of Southern Ontario than if everyone just raped Toronto.
All of this is dependent on the region continuing to grow, and I think it will. Canada will always be a better home to immigrants than the US, and Toronto will soon find itself in an important world position. It'd not only be both a global economic center, but will be (and currently is) a global immigration centre. We've established ourselves as one of the best regions to live in the world, and as a hotspot for global immigration, which won't die down for a long while.

 

[rbot]

In 2025 the population will be 0 cause the world will end in 2012 duh!

lol...

 

[SunriseChampion]

I actually like how decentralised (to a point) the GGH is and it looks like it'll only become moreso with intensification of outlying cities. A complete end to bedroom communities would be nice and may one day come (60 years? 100?) but if employment becomes less and less centralised in the region as a whole, everyone wins. This also gives reason to vastly improve the public transit of outlying cities and towns which will also end up benefitting everyone.

 

[allabootmatt]

A further question for the more knowledgable: what will be the population of Toronto proper in the 2011 census? As I recall, from 2001 to 2006 it grew only slightly, although that obscures intra-city trends like the shift of population to the centre, and the increase in singles as opposed to families. But surely the explosive growth of the core, broadly defined--which is a huge area by the standards of most North American cities--will begin to move the needle on the 416 population, right?

Also, I have heard that for various reasons--eg, the prevalence of undocumented immigrants, highly mobile businesspeople, students etc.--the Canadian census tends to undercount the 416 somewhat. Is there anything to this theory?

 

[scarberiankhatru]

They always undercount, but did they undercount Toronto more than other places, not just more than usual? The city has said, as here in the ward profiles:

*Note: Although Statistics Canada makes a great effort to count every person, in each Census a notable number of people
are left out for a variety of reasons. For example, people may be traveling, some dwellings are hard to find, and some people simply
refuse to participate. Statistics Canada takes this into account and estimates an ‘undercoverage’ rate for the urban region (CMA)
every Census, but not for the City. The 2001 rate for the Toronto CMA was 5.17%. If the rate were the same for 2006, the City’s
actual population would be 2,632,700 [instead of 2,503,280].

Following a review of the 2006 Census results for Toronto, City of Toronto staff identified the possibility that the Census may have
undercounted more of Toronto's population than usual. City staff continue to investigate this issue.

So the 2011 population could be something like a flat 2,500,000 on paper or it could be closer to 2,750,000 in real life.

The growth in the core is not as explosive as it may seem. If Toronto has 1,000,000 residences, each with 2.5 people, we can build 50,000 new residences and the growth would seem substantial, but if average household sizes drop to 2.4, the city only gains 20,000 people. Those downtown condos virtually never have more than 3 people living in them, and even 3 is pretty rare, happening when a young couple has a kid. Those 300-unit downtown condos can only do so much when there's only 400 people living in them. The real population swings happen in houses...two kids move out and the household size drops by 50%, or a widow dies and a family of four moves in, tripling the population.

 

[CharlotteR]

It's a really important point to make. I was a census enumerator here in Ottawa during the 2006 census and in the neighbourhoods that I was working in (lower income areas like Vanier and Overbrook, for those familiar), I had very high rates of refusal to participate.

 

[BobBob]

So, if someone refuses to be counted, they are not?

I would hope StatsCan has better ways of determining population counts than just asking people. I understand that you need cooperation to get info on things like mother tongue, religious affiliation, etc, but surely there are better ways to figure out how many people we have.

 

[yin_yang]

i don't know...plenty of people have family in this area or commute...know a few myself that start their commutes at 7am to get to work at 9am.

 

[CharlotteR]

So, if someone refuses to be counted, they are not?

I would hope StatsCan has better ways of determining population counts than just asking people. I understand that you need cooperation to get info on things like mother tongue, religious affiliation, etc, but surely there are better ways to figure out how many people we have.

After two refusals (we were to gently remind them that it was a compulsory), we were supposed to hand off the file to our area supervisor who would try as well. I don't know where it would go from there. Since there was no accurate way to know how many people actually reside there in this situation (my areas of charge were lower-income areas which complicates things as the majority of the refusals were by people who obviously didn't trust any government representative), I'm not sure where they would get solid numbers. When you combine that with a general reluctance to actually use the law to extract such information, really accurate numbers can be hard to come by.

 

[BobBob]

But the government presumably knows how many SIN numbers are out there of people who haven't been declared deceased. And it knows the number of people who are here under a refugee status or student visa. Last known addresses exist somewhere, I'm sure. Not sure whether there are privacy issues with sharing such info. Do you know whether information like that is correlated with the manual census results in order to correct them?

 

[Archivist]

BobBob, in general, there are privacy issues in using any data gathered within government agencies for any purpose other than that which it was gathered to serve. Also, the amount of work involved in correlating the data would be enormous, and would no doubt still leave enormous gaps.