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Originally Posted by saffronleaf
What are Canada's next major metropolitan areas? You could look at this question however you please. One way to look at it may be to see which batch of metropolitan areas are likely to hit ~750K people next.
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One problem with this perspective is that Canadians' view of what is major is anchored by the size of the largest cities in the country. Now that Toronto is a somewhat major city by international standards, we have much higher standards than we did when the biggest Canadian city was equivalent to Cleveland. London ON at around 500,000 would have easily been considered a major city in the 1960's, or a huge city in the 1910's. Looking at it another way, I have watched population growth for years and people talk about a lot of cities that have grown by 50% in exactly the same way they did 20-30 years ago. I think exactly the same thing is going to happen as today's 500,000 cities grow toward 750,000 while Canada's biggest city becomes a major metropolitan area of 10,000,000 and the world develops much larger megacities that Canadians are more likely to visit.
It is also interesting to look at what happened demographically when cities moved up a "tier". In 1951, Calgary had 129,000 people and Halifax had 162,000 (according to Wikipedia). In 1971, Calgary had 403,000 people and Halifax had 261,000. Both cities were boom towns by today's standards. But only Calgary somewhat moved up in perceived status while Halifax stayed about the same. During this period Calgary was growing by something like 8% a year. Most of the cities that people are speculating about here have only been growing by 1-3% a year.