Canada Map of Provinces and Territories with Population Density

How to use this map

Pick a map type along the top and the map redraws. Provinces colours the thirteen jurisdictions so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Cities sizes each metropolitan area by population, Rivers draws the main watercourses, and Satellite swaps the flat colours for real satellite imagery, and Blank outline gives you black on white for printing. Click any province, or any row in the table, and its figures appear in the Selection panel along with a link to its own detailed map.

The layer switches on the right are independent of the map type. That is the part people miss. Choosing a type sets a sensible starting combination, but every switch still works afterwards, so a blank outline with rivers turned on and boundaries turned off is two clicks away. Move the pointer across the map and the readout at the bottom left gives you latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes and seconds.

Where the data comes from

Two sources, joined on the provincial identifier. The outlines are Natural Earth at the 1 to 50 million scale, which is public domain and generalised for display rather than survey. The population and land area figures are Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population, and they meet the geometry on PRUID 10 through 62.

The join is checked two ways rather than assumed. The thirteen populations sum to 36,991,981, which is the published national total exactly. The thirteen land areas sum to 8,788,702.82 square kilometres against the published 8,788,702.8, a residual of two hundredths of a square kilometre across a country of nearly nine million. That check earned its keep: it first came out five square kilometres high, and the cause was Prince Edward Island carrying its 2016 land area of 5,686.03 rather than the 2021 figure of 5,681.18. Nothing else in the table moved. Nunavut was checked a second time by adding its three regions independently.

The outlines carry 158 separate landmasses and 5,600 vertices for the whole country. That sounds thin for Canada, and it is deliberate. At the scale this map draws, the Arctic archipelago is the only place where extra vertices buy you anything visible, so the simplification was tuned to keep every island above a couple of square kilometres and throw away the rest.

Why county does not work across Canada

If you have come here from an American state map expecting a uniform county layer underneath, Canada will not give you one. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island have counties. Ontario has counties, districts, regional municipalities and single tier cities all mixed together. Quebec has regional county municipalities, British Columbia has regional districts, Alberta has counties and municipal districts and specialized municipalities, Saskatchewan and Manitoba have rural municipalities, and Newfoundland and Labrador has no county layer at all.

The one layer that exists everywhere is the Statistics Canada census division. Every province and territory is fully partitioned by them, they nest cleanly inside the province, and their populations add back to the provincial total. That is why the province pages linked from this map are all built on census divisions, with the local name shown on each page: counties in the Maritimes, regional county municipalities in Quebec, regional districts in British Columbia, plain numbered divisions in Saskatchewan and Newfoundland.

The Selection panel tells you which term applies before you click through, so you know whether you are about to see fifteen counties or ninety eight regional county municipalities.

The projection, and the one sixth rule

This map uses Lambert Conformal Conic, the standard projection for Canadian mapping. A conic projection needs two standard parallels, the latitudes where the cone cuts the globe and the scale is exactly true. The usual rule of thumb is to place them one sixth of the way in from the north and south limits of whatever you are drawing.

Canada spans 41.7 to 83.1 degrees north in this dataset, so the rule puts the parallels at 48.58 and 76.21 degrees. The official Lambert projection used for Canadian federal mapping sits at 49 and 77. The rule of thumb lands within half a degree of the values a national mapping agency chose deliberately, which is a pleasing thing to be able to check for yourself, and the parallels here are computed from the data rather than typed in.

Be honest about what that buys you at this scale. Toronto to Vancouver measures 3,358 kilometres by great circle and 3,367 kilometres off the projected coordinates, an error of about one part in 390. That is fine for a national overview and useless for anything else. The provincial maps cover a few hundred kilometres rather than four thousand, and they hold the same projection to better than one part in four thousand. Scale error on a conic grows with distance from the standard parallels, so a smaller map is always a more faithful one.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

The Satellite map type replaces the flat province colours with real imagery of Canada. It comes from NASA, specifically the Blue Marble shaded relief and bathymetry layer served through Global Imagery Browse Services. It is a cloud free composite rather than a single day of observations, so you see the whole of Canada at once instead of whatever cloud happened to be passing over it.

Fitting it to this map takes a step that most web maps skip. The imagery arrives in plate carree, where latitude and longitude are treated as a plain grid. This map is drawn in Lambert conformal conic. Laying one straight over the other would leave the coastline and the province boundaries drifting apart from each other as you move north, by kilometres rather than metres.

So the imagery is reprojected in your browser before it is drawn. Every pixel on the map is converted back to a latitude and longitude, and the matching pixel is read out of the source image. Both then sit in the same projection, which is why the imagery lines up with the boundaries. It is then clipped to the outline, so the map shows Canada rather than a rectangle of the surrounding region.

At national scale the Arctic islands read as ice and snow while the boreal forest reads dark green. That is a real seasonal signal in the imagery rather than a styling choice.

The imagery is public domain. NASA asks to be credited rather than paid, and the credit is drawn onto the map itself so it travels with the image when you download it. That is also why this is NASA imagery rather than the sharper commercial layers you see on the big mapping sites. Those are licensed from private operators and cannot be redistributed through a download button.

Two practical notes. The imagery takes a second or two to appear the first time, because it is fetched and reprojected on the spot rather than served ready made. And at roughly five hundred metres per pixel it is a landscape view rather than a street view, so you can read terrain, forest cover and coastline, but not individual buildings.

A check you can repeat on paper

Take the two ends of the distribution, Prince Edward Island and Nunavut.

Prince Edward Island has 154,331 people on 5,686.03 square kilometres of land. Divide one by the other and you get 27.14 people per square kilometre, the highest in the country. Nunavut has 36,858 people on 1,836,993.78 square kilometres, which comes to 0.0201 people per square kilometre.

Divide the first by the second. Prince Edward Island is roughly 1,350 times more densely settled than Nunavut. Both are in the same country, both are counted the same way, and the difference is three orders of magnitude. Select each in the tool and the Selection panel shows the same two numbers.

One more you can verify without a calculator: add the thirteen populations in the table. They come to 36,991,981. If your total differs, a territory was missed, and it is almost always one of the three small ones at the bottom of the sort.

Mistakes that catch people out

Quoting Canada as 9,984,670 square kilometres and then dividing by population. That figure is total area including fresh water, and it is the right number for describing the country and the wrong number for density. Census land area is 8,788,703 square kilometres. The gap is larger than Ontario, so the two give noticeably different answers, and every density on this page uses the land figure.

Treating provincial density as if anyone experiences it. Canada comes out at 4.2 people per square kilometre, which describes nobody. Roughly four in five Canadians live in a census metropolitan area, and those cover a tiny fraction of the land. Turn on the Cities layer and the point makes itself.

Reading the boundary as authoritative. These outlines are Natural Earth, generalised for display at national scale, which is the right choice for a map you can load in a second. They are not the legal boundary and they are not the census boundary, and near the coast they can run a kilometre or so inland. Vancouver, Victoria, Trois Rivieres and Saint John all sit fractionally outside the drawn coastline for that reason, so the tool falls back to the nearest province rather than reporting none.

Comparing densities across maps using quantile shading. The bands here are fixed rather than quantile, so a colour means the same number on this page and on every province page. Quantile shading recolours itself for each dataset, which makes two maps look comparable when they are not.

Expecting the rivers to be hydrography. They are the main courses only, generalised for orientation. For real river geometry go to the provincial hydrographic networks, which is what the province pages use.

Related Calculators and Reference

• New Brunswick County Map: the first province page built on this system, with all fifteen counties, their census land areas and the gap between boundary and land.
• Coordinate Converter, latitude and longitude to UTM: this map reads out in degrees, minutes and seconds, so go here when you need the same position as a UTM grid reference.
• GPS Waypoint Logger: collect points in the field, then bring the CSV back and check which province or division they fall in.
• Contour Map Generator from XYZ data: this page has no terrain layer, so use this when you have your own elevation points to contour.
• Cross Section Maker from boreholes: once you have located your holes on a plan, this turns them into a section.
• Outcrop Photo Annotator: for adding a scale bar and north arrow to field photographs.
• Statistics Canada Census Profile, 2021: the official source for every population and land area figure on this page, down to the census subdivision.

Boundaries and rivers: Natural Earth, public domain. Population and land area: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population, used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence. Metropolitan populations: Statistics Canada census metropolitan areas and agglomerations, 2021. Neither source endorses this product.