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Old Posted Mar 9, 2013, 11:33 PM
memph memph is offline
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What would Canadian MSAs/CSAs look like?

I thought this could be interesting for comparing Canadian cities to American MSA/CSAs.

An MSA is made up of central counties, where most of the urban population lives in the main urban area of the MSA (at least 50% of total pop must be urban). It also has outlying counties, which have at least 25% of the workers who live there commuting to the central counties. And yeah, the MSA (and CSA) is delineated at the county level, not at the municipal level like CMAs. I'll consider census divisions to be equivalent to counties.

Toronto-Hamilton-Barrie CSA: 7,277,300
Montreal CSA: 4,454,842
Ottawa-Cornwall-Brockville CSA: 1,579,192
Winnipeg CSA: 826,679
Kitchener-Waterloo-Guelph CSA: 715,456
London-Oxford CSA: 594,426


Toronto-Oshawa MSA: 6,111,072
Montreal-Saint Jean MSA: 4,224,026
Ottawa MSA: 1,368,722
Winnipeg MSA: 790,391
Hamilton MSA: 564,825
Kitchener-Waterloo MSA: 507,096
London-St Thomas MSA: 488,707
Barrie-Orillia MSA: 446,063
St. Catharines-Niagara MSA: 431,346
Windsor MSA: 388,782
Guelph MSA: 208,360
Brantford MSA: 136,035
Peterborough MSA: 134,933

EDIT: The numbers below are based on the Transporation Tomorrow Survey, which are different from those of the 2006 census (see post #6)

Although Oshawa and Hamilton are considered separate urban areas from Toronto, this is only because they are considered separate CMAs. Since >25% of Durham and Hamilton commutes into the rest of the GTA, their urban areas (population centres) would not be considered separate. Therefore, Toronto's core counties would be Toronto, Peel, York, Halton, Durham and Hamilton.

Kawartha Lakes and Dufferin both meet the outlying county requirements.

For CSAs, you take the smaller metro area, and add the percentage of workers commuting into the bigger metro to the percentage of jobs in the smaller metro worked on by residents of the larger metro to get the "interchange number".

Simcoe County would qualify as being part of Toronto's CSA. Wellington, Peterborough and Brant come close at around 22-23 according to the Transportation Toronto Survey from 2006, but close is not good enough. Niagara and Waterloo Regions aren't very close at 15 and 10 respectively.

However, Wellington County would comfortably qualify as being part of KW's CSA.

Overall populations would be around 6.7 million for Toronto's MSA and 7.15 million for the CSA by 2011 census numbers and around 7 million and 7.45 million respectively by the 2012 estimates.

Kitchener's MSA would have 507k and the Kitchener-Guelph CSA would have 715k by 2011 census numbers and around 535k and 740k respectively by 2012 estimates.

There are some other counties, like Haldimand and Northumberland that might come close to joining the CSAs of Toronto and Peterborough, but they weren't part of the TTS 2006 survey.

edit: maybe move this up to the Canada section

Last edited by memph; Nov 21, 2013 at 4:08 AM.