Manitoba Census Division Map with Population and Density

How to use this map

Pick a map type along the top and the map redraws. Divisions colours the twenty three census divisions so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Cities sizes the main centres, Rivers draws the major named rivers, and Satellite swaps the flat colours for real satellite imagery, and Blank outline gives you black on white for printing. Click any division, or any row in the table, and its figures appear in the Selection panel.

Use the plus and minus buttons at the top right of the map to zoom, then drag to pan. On a phone you can pinch instead. The zoom controls never appear in the downloaded image.

What a census division is in Manitoba

Manitoba's census divisions are statistical groupings rather than governments. Their official names are Division No. 1 through Division No. 23, with no councils and no offices attached. The province's working local units are cities, towns, rural municipalities and northern communities, and they do not line up with the twenty three divisions.

Alberta and Saskatchewan number their divisions the same way. Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia do not, because in those provinces the census division is usually a real administrative body.

A map labelled Division No. 14 tells you nothing, so each division here carries the name of its largest centre alongside the number. Division No. 11 is Winnipeg, No. 7 is Brandon, No. 22 is Thompson. The official name stays in the table and in the CSV export.

The most lopsided province in the country

Division No. 11 is not a region around Winnipeg. It is the City of Winnipeg and nothing else, which makes Manitoba's concentration the starkest in this series.

That single division is 569 square kilometres, about one tenth of one percent of Manitoba, and it holds 753,938 people, which is 56 percent of the province. Its density is 1,324 people per square kilometre. At the other end, Division No. 23 in the far north runs at 0.02 per square kilometre. The range from top to bottom is roughly sixty thousand to one.

Compare that with the neighbours. Alberta splits its population between two cities. Saskatchewan splits between two. Manitoba does not split at all: over half the province lives inside one municipal boundary, and the next largest division, Steinbach's, holds a little over eighty thousand.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

The Satellite map type replaces the flat division colours with real imagery of Manitoba. 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 Manitoba 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 division 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 Manitoba rather than a rectangle of the surrounding region.

The great lakes of the province, Winnipeg, Manitoba and Winnipegosis, dominate the middle of the map, which is a useful reminder of how much of the drawn area is water rather than land.

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 Division No. 11, the City of Winnipeg.

Statistics Canada gives it 753,938 people and 569.31 square kilometres of land. Divide one by the other:

753,938 divided by 569.31 equals 1,324.3 people per square kilometre.

Select Division No. 11 and the Selection panel reads 1,324.3. Switch to imperial and it becomes 3,430.0 per square mile.

Now add the twenty three land areas in the table. They come to 540,310.19 square kilometres, which is the published provincial figure exactly. Add the populations and you get 1,342,153, also exact.

Mistakes that catch people out

Using the wrong provincial land area. Manitoba is often quoted at around 553,000 square kilometres of land. The 2021 census figure is 540,310.19, and that is what the divisions on this page sum to. If your totals are out by roughly twelve thousand, this is usually why.

Reading Division No. 11 as Greater Winnipeg. It is the city proper. The suburbs around it, including Springfield, East St. Paul and West St. Paul, sit in Divisions No. 12 and No. 14.

Expecting to find Flin Flon here. It straddles the Saskatchewan boundary and the census reports it as a split municipality with a separate figure on each side, so a single dot with a single number would misrepresent it.

Treating the drawn area as land. The boundaries here enclose about seventeen percent more than the census land area, the largest gap of any province in this series. That difference is fresh water: Lake Winnipeg, Lake Manitoba, Lake Winnipegosis, Southern Indian Lake and thousands more. Every density on this page is computed on census land area, and the Selection panel shows both figures.

Assuming the province stops at the sixtieth parallel and nothing more. Manitoba also has a Hudson Bay coastline, which is why Division No. 23 reaches the sea at Churchill and why the map has a curved north eastern edge rather than a straight one.

Related Calculators and Reference

• Canada Map: the national view, with all thirteen provinces and territories and a link into each one that has its own map.
• Saskatchewan Census Division Map: the neighbour to the west, which numbers its divisions the same way.
• Alberta Census Division Map: nineteen divisions split between two cities rather than one.
• Ontario Census Division Map: forty nine counties, districts and single tier cities.
• Quebec Census Division Map: ninety eight divisions and the most concentrated population in the country.
• Statistics Canada Census Profile, 2021: the official source behind every figure on this page.

Boundaries and land area: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census cartographic boundary files. Population: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population, used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence. Rivers: Natural Earth, public domain. Statistics Canada does not endorse this product.