Canada - World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe

Health systems in transition Canada 3
organized in the two countries, domestic debates concerning access and quality
as well as health system reform are highly influenced by Canadian perceptions
of the state of health care in the United States.
Although it has a large land mass, Canada’s population was less than
34 million in 2011. The two largest cities are Toronto and Montreal, with
5.7 million and 3.9 million inhabitants, respectively, living in the cities and
surrounding areas, defined as census metropolitan areas. 1 In contrast, the
country’s capital city, Ottawa, has a census metropolitan area population of
1.2 million. Although Canada has one of the lowest human population densities
in the world (3.4 persons per km 2 ), most of the population is concentrated in
southern urban centres that are close to the United States border. A relatively
small number of Canadians lives in the immense rural and more northerly
regions of the country. Most new immigrants live in Canada’s largest cities
while the majority of the country’s Aboriginal (First Nation, Inuit and Métis)
citizens live on rural reserves, land claim regions in the Arctic or in the poorer
city neighbourhoods.
Table 1.1
Population in persons and percentages in all the Canadian provinces and territories
(capital cities in parentheses), 2011
Province/ territory Number % of total
British Columbia (Victoria) 4 400 057 13.14
Alberta (Edmonton) 3 645 257 10.89
Saskatchewan (Regina) 1 033 381 3.09
Manitoba (Winnipeg) 1 208 268 3.61
Ontario (Toronto) 12 851 821 38.39
Quebec (Québec) 7 903 001 23.61
New Brunswick (Fredericton) 751 171 2.24
Nova Scotia (Halifax) 921 727 2.75
Prince Edward Island (Charlottetown) 140 204 0.42
Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John’s) 514 536 1.54
Yukon (Whitehorse) 33 897 0.10
Northwest Territories (Yellowknife) 41 462 0.12
Nunavut (Iqaluit) 31 906 0.10
Canada (Ottawa) 33 476 688 100.00
Source: Statistics Canada (2011).
1 According to Statistics Canada, a census metropolitan area has one or more neighbouring municipalities situated
around a large urban core. For example, while there are 5.7 million people in the Toronto census metropolitan area,
the population residing in the urban core of Toronto was estimated at 2.5 million in 2006, the last census year.