Canada is a big country, the second largest in the world behind only Russia. But most of its 35 million people live in a very small area.
The maps below show just how small.
Where do Canada’s people live? (size = population)
This is a cartogram, a map in which the area of each region is substituted with some mapping variable, population in this case. Said another way, the size of each region corresponds to the number of people who live there.
Canada gets deformed to the point it’s completely unrecognizable (for comparison, see these cartograms of the U.S. and the U.K., which more or less retain their basic shape).
Notice that the bulk of the cartogram’s area, and therefore Canada’s population, is in the bulge on the right. And that bulge is predominantly made up of just three light-colored regions and their immediate surroundings. Those regions are Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, Canada’s 1st, 2nd, and 4th most populous metro areas respectively.
A full half of Canada’s population lives here.
To make it easier to follow where the bulge goes when the map shrinks down, here is another cartogram. It is the same as the cartogram at the top, except this one has only two colored regions. Half of Canada lives in the red, half lives in the grey.
Half of Canada’s people (red) live south of the Washington-Oregon border
View on Youtube
Credit to reddit user Machetegun / Brilliant Maps for the “50% of Canadians Live South of This Line” map
To see how the unevenness of Canada’s population compares with other places in the world, see: The Nordics, Northern Africa, India, Spain, Tokyo, The World.
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Originally published at metrocosm.com.
