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Toronto population using US MSA criteria

King of Kensington

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The US Census Bureau uses counties as building blocks for its metropolitan areas. The core urban area is defined in central counties and outlying counties are added if 25% commute to the central counties. Something like 90% of the US metro area populations lives in the so-called "central counties."

So for Toronto the GTA would make up the central counties: Toronto, York, Peel, Halton and Durham. Dufferin County with 37.8% commuting to the GTA would also be included. This leads to a population of 6,111,092 in 2011, putting it fifth place in the US and Canada behind Dallas-Fort Worth and just ahead of Houston, Philadelphia and Washington. Maybe call it Toronto-Mississauga-Oshawa. :)

The latest commuting figures I could find were from 2006. Hamilton with 23.7% commuting to the GTA and Kawartha Lakes/Victoria County 24.5% I think would fall just short of inclusion, as would Simcoe County at 21.8% and Northumberland at 18.8% (Bradford incidentally has 71% commuting to the GTA, Innisfil and New Tecumseth at 40%, Barrie at 21.1%; in Northumberland Port Hope comes in at 30% but its neighbor Cobourg just 15%).

A county where 15% commute to any county (not just the central counties) gets added to the so-called Combined Statistical Area. That would bring in Hamilton and Barrie-Orillia (Simcoe and the Cobourg-Port Hope (Northumberland) and Lindsay (Kawartha Lakes) micropolitan area, a population of 7,232,444, seventh in North America behind the Bay Area and Boston-Providence.

Guelph/Wellington County falls just short of inclusion at 14.4% (but maybe it's risen 0.6% since?). Adding that population in would bring the Toronto-Hamilton-? CSA to 7,440,844.

St. Catharines/Niagara isn't connected enough to the GTA in terms of commuting patterns and I don't think would merit inclusion if Hamilton was added as a "core county" (for instance while 55% of Grimsby residents commute to Hamilton and to a lesser extent the GTA, by St. Catharines it's only 7%).

The CMA concept uses municipalities as building blocks but the criteria isn't all that clear - apparently once a CMA is created it can never be abolished. Oshawa for instance doesn't really justify its own CMA when twice as many Whitby commuters go to Toronto than Oshawa, and also Burlington sends more to Toronto than Hamilton.
 
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What were your commuting stats based on? From the Transportation Tomorrow Survey (2006), it looked like Hamilton and Kawartha Lakes both sent >25% of their commuters into the GTA.

That's why I thought Hamilton could be considered a core county (which seems a bit crazy to me) and Kawartha Lakes an outlying county. The commuter interchange is the percentage of workers from the smaller MSA who work in the bigger one PLUS the percentage of jobs in the smaller MSA held by workers from the larger MSA. This and the inclusion of Hamilton and Kawartha in the Toronto MSA (GTAH?) would help give Peterborough (City+County) and Brantford/Brant the commuter interchange numbers to join the CSA (in addition to Simcoe), at least from the TTS 2006 numbers, yours seem a little different.

Guelph-Wellington had the commuter interchange values to join the Toronto CSA, but the commuter interchange value is greater with Waterloo Region so I think you would instead have a Kitchener-Waterloo-Guelph CSA.

By the way, I treated Guelph+Wellington, Brantford+Brant, Barrie+Orilla+Simcoe and Peterborough City+County as single counties. Btw do you know what the commuter interchange rate of Haldimand would be with the Brantford, Hamilton and St Catharines-Niagara MSAs? I wonder if it would qualify to join one of them or at least their CSAs. Ditto for Perth, Oxford and Norfolk and the Brantford, Hamilton, London and K-W MSAs.
 
Haldimand County would go in as an "outlying" county for Hamilton, adding 44,876 into its "MSA." Hardly anyone commutes to Brantford or St. Catharines- Niagara though.

So Hamilton "MSA" is 564,825 and the Toronto-Hamilton CSA goes to 7,277,320.

Not sure when StatsCan's 2011 commuter flows will be released.
 
If Norfolk qualifies for a micropolitan area (Simcoe-Delhi?) it has an interchange number of 15.83, just enough to join the Hamilton MSA mostly via Haldimand, although it has an interchange number of 28.32 with Oxford County mostly via Tilsonburg and 21.94 with Brant(ford). I don't think you can have CSAs with micropolitan areas though, which is what Oxford County, so maybe Norfolk wouldn't be part of the Woodstock micropolitan area for that reason, but also wouldn't be part of the Brantford or Hamilton CSAs since it's more connected to Oxford county?

Brantford's MSA falls just short of joining the Hamilton CSA with an interchange number of 14.05.
 
Guelph-Wellington has an interchange number of 18.66 with the Toronto MSA, high enough to be part of the CSA, however, the interchange number is even higher with Waterloo Region (25.08).

Perth County only has an interchange number of 12.75 with Waterloo Region, not enough to join its CSA. Stratford and St Marys have significantly more jobs than workers. There is virtually no commuting between the Western part of Perth (Perth West, South and St Marys) and Waterloo Region with only 85 people commuting between the two areas for work. They are within commutable distance, so I guess this is an indicator that there are good enough jobs in Perth County for its residents and cheap enough housing in Waterloo Region to avoid "drive until you qualify" into Perth.

Since Kawartha Lakes doesn't make it into Toronto's MSA (only CSA) according to the 2006 Census, Peterborough wouldn't be part of Toronto's CSA although it did make the CSA using the TTS 2006 numbers where Kawartha was part of Toronto's MSA and the relatively high interconnectivity between Kawartha and Peterborough brought Peterborough into Toronto's CSA.

London would likely pick up Elgin County in its MSA and Oxford County in its CSA... I'll look into that later.
 
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Very interesting. Hard to believe that the Greater Golden Horseshoe CSA based on US standards not only breaks the 7 million mark, but would cover such a massive area. On that note, there is something wrong with our provincial economy when people feel the need to commute over such distances to find work rather than gaining employment locally.
 
By the way, I treated Guelph+Wellington, Brantford+Brant, Barrie+Orilla+Simcoe and Peterborough City+County as single counties.

I think it's fair to consider that for census and general geographic-definition purposes, they've *always* been treated as single units, whatever the governing minutiae, i.e. the separations aren't "etched in stone" (on highway maps, in census publications, et al) the way they've been for, say, Virginia's Independent Cities. (And not even as "Guelph+Wellington"; but as just plain "Wellngton".)

But I've gone through those arguments here before. And again, those sorts of details may be lost to younger electronic-age generations who haven't been so geographically conditioned by commonly available provincial highway maps, print-version municipal directories, et al--to say nothing of their conditioning within a post-Harris-mega-amalgamation era...
 
If Norfolk qualifies for a micropolitan area (Simcoe-Delhi?)

Or Simcoe-Port Dover, or some variation thereof--though maybe just "Simcoe", since it'd be the only 10,000+ urbanized area/cluster within Norfolk.

Though it raises a post-mega-amalgamation question of nomenclature; like, should Kawartha Lakes be named "Kawartha Lakes", or "Lindsay"? "Chatham-Kent", or "Chatham"? (Chatham-Wallaceburg?) (Though I might opt for "Belleville-Quinte West" over "Belleville-Trenton" at this point)

And if we were to be super-fixated upon US-style county definitions, should Cornwall consist of S-D-G, or just plain S-G? (Food for thought: although S-D-G and L-G and P-R have been, at least in the not-too-distant past, depicted separately on highway maps and the like, Statscan and municipal-directory resources have treated them as single entities--the inverse of the "independent city" situation.)

All in all, this may say something about *why* Statscan has shied away from US-style county-based metropolitan definitions; Canadians just aren't as prone to obsessive-compulsively defining themselves through county-type geography the way that Yanks are, a disinterest even reflected in many of the municipal-geography reform patterns over the past half century (regions, megamunicipalities, etc). Whereas the common US geographic county pattern has remained remarkably etched-in-stone stable for going on a century now--presumably, reforming any of that smacks of "socialism" or "communism" or what have you...
 
None, really, except for Statscan entropy. Though there could be an argument for an Oshawa MSA as a component within a Toronto CSA; sort of like the strange MSA patchworks that compose present-day CSAs like Chicago--but Oshawa itself'd be like Joliet or Aurora or Elgin, places that may have been separate urbanized-area nucleii in the 60s but that are now absorbed into Chicagoland sprawl...
 
Not really. Twice as many people in Whitby commute to Toronto than to Oshawa.

Joliet, Aurora and Elgin are part of the Chicago MSA, being in the "collar counties" (basically their GTA).
 

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