Ontario Census Division Map with Counties, Districts and Density

How to use this map

Pick a map type along the top and the map redraws. Divisions colours the forty nine census divisions so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Cities sizes the thirty six population centres, Rivers draws the named watercourses, 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.

Southern Ontario is crowded with small divisions, so 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 Ontario

Ontario does not have one kind of second level government, it has four, and the census division layer stitches them together. There are counties in the southwest and east, regional municipalities around the Golden Horseshoe, districts across the north, and single tier cities that answer to nobody above them. Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton and Greater Sudbury are each their own census division. Kenora District, at 395,432 square kilometres, is another.

Districts deserve a word of their own. They are not municipal governments at all. A district is a geographic area used for statistics, courts and land registry, and most of the land inside one belongs to no municipality. Unorganized Kenora District alone covers over 98 percent of that district's land and about a tenth of its people.

Two things that make Ontario hard to draw

The first is separated cities, and it is the trap that catches anyone building this map from boundary files alone. When a city separates from its county it becomes its own single tier municipality, so it disappears from the county boundary. Statistics Canada still counts it inside the census division. Draw the county as published and you get a county with a city shaped hole in it, while the population figure attached to it includes everyone living in that hole.

Middlesex without London came out 14 percent short of its census land area. Essex without Windsor was 9 percent short, Hastings without Belleville and Quinte West 8 percent. Nothing in the boundary data says which county a separated city belongs to, and geography alone will not tell you: Belleville sits on the Bay of Quinte, so the nearest boundary across the water belongs to Prince Edward County, not to Hastings where it actually is. The fix is a lookup table of municipalities against their census division, which is data rather than geometry.

The second is First Nations reserves. A reserve is a census subdivision but not a municipality, so it appears in no municipal boundary layer at all. Six Nations of the Grand River is most of the gap in Brant, Wikwemikong is most of the gap in Manitoulin. Ontario publishes reserve boundaries separately, 246 of them covering 8,341 square kilometres, and they have to be merged in by hand.

Both were fixed here, and the check that proves it is the towns. Before the repair, seven of the thirty six population centres fell outside their own division and Belleville landed in the wrong county. After it, all thirty six land inside the division they belong to.

The Great Lakes, and where the water went

Ontario tags every boundary polygon by extent type: mainland, islands, or water. That is unusually helpful. The Great Lakes portions of each division are already separated out, so removing them is a matter of dropping one attribute rather than clipping geometry against a coastline. Essex does not sprawl into Lake Erie here and Bruce does not swallow Georgian Bay.

Inland water is a different matter. The drawn divisions total about 9.6 percent more than the census land area, and that difference is lakes: Nipigon, Lac Seul, Lake of the Woods and thousands more across the northern districts. Every density on this page is computed on census land area, never on the drawn area, and the Selection panel shows both so you can see the size of the effect on any division you pick.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

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

The change from farmland in the south to the boreal shield further north shows as a clear colour break across the middle of the province.

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 Toronto, which is a single tier city and a census division at once.

Statistics Canada gives it 2,794,356 people and 631.10 square kilometres of land. Divide one by the other:

2,794,356 divided by 631.10 equals 4,427.8 people per square kilometre.

Select Toronto and the Selection panel reads 4,427.8. Switch to imperial and it becomes 11,467.9 per square mile.

Now take Kenora District: 15,348 people on 395,432 square kilometres, which is 0.17 per square kilometre. Toronto is roughly 26,500 times denser. That is why the chart above is logarithmic, and it is also why a single density colour scale across Ontario tells you almost nothing on its own.

One more without arithmetic: add the forty nine populations. They come to 14,223,942.

Mistakes that catch people out

Assuming the county boundary is the census division. In eleven cases it is not, because a separated city sits inside it. Always total your divisions against the published provincial land area of 892,411.76 square kilometres before trusting any one of them.

Confusing Greater Sudbury with Sudbury District. They are two different census divisions with almost the same name, codes 3553 and 3552. The city has 166,004 people on 3,197 square kilometres. The district has 22,277 on 39,897.

Reading Brant as the county alone. The Brant census division is the County of Brant plus the City of Brantford plus Six Nations. The county on its own is about a quarter of the division's population.

Expecting the projection to hold across the province. Ontario is over 1,600 kilometres corner to corner, and Toronto to Thunder Bay measures 924.4 kilometres by great circle against 922.5 off the projected coordinates, an agreement of about one part in 500. The Maritime maps in this series hold to one part in several thousand because they cover a fraction of the distance. Scale error on a conic grows with distance from the standard parallels.

Treating the drawn area as land. Brant and Manitoulin in particular come out a few percent above their census land area here, because reserve boundaries and census boundaries do not agree exactly. The land figures in the table are Statistics Canada throughout.

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.
• British Columbia Regional District Map: twenty nine districts, clipped to the provincial land polygon, and the same lake effect on a coastal province.
• Nova Scotia County Map: eighteen counties traced from the real shoreline, where the gap between drawn area and land area maps the lake country almost exactly.
• New Brunswick County Map: fifteen counties from the official provincial boundary file.
• Prince Edward Island County Map: three counties, and the tightest agreement in the series between drawn area and census land.
• Coordinate Converter, latitude and longitude to UTM: this map reads out in degrees, minutes and seconds, so go here when you need a UTM grid reference.
• Statistics Canada Census Profile, 2021: the official source for every population and land area figure on this page.

Boundaries, rivers and reserve areas: Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Land Information Ontario, under the Open Government Licence Ontario. Population and land area: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population, used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence. Neither agency endorses this product.