Quebec Census Division Map with MRCs, Population and Density

How to use this map

Pick a map type along the top and the map redraws. Divisions colours the ninety eight census divisions so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Cities sizes the fifty seven municipalities above twenty thousand people, 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.

The divisions along the Saint Lawrence are small and tightly packed, 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 Quebec

Quebec's census divisions are mostly municipalités régionales de comté, the MRCs, which are real second level governments with councils and budgets. Eighty one of the ninety eight are MRCs. The rest are what Statistics Canada calls equivalent territories: twelve of them, plus five regional county divisions. Montréal, Québec, Laval and Longueuil are agglomerations rather than MRCs, and Nord-du-Québec is a vast administrative region covering more than half the province.

This matters when you read a population figure. The Montréal census division is the agglomeration, which is the island: 2,004,265 people. The city of Montréal on its own is 1,762,949. The difference is Westmount, Côte-Saint-Luc, Dollard-Des Ormeaux, Pointe-Claire and the other independent municipalities on the island. Quoting the city figure against the division's land area gives you a density that is wrong by a quarter.

The concentration is the whole story

Quebec is 1,298,600 square kilometres of land with 8,501,833 people on it, which averages to about 6.5 per square kilometre. That average describes almost nobody.

Order the divisions from densest to emptiest and add them up. Half the population is accounted for before you have covered one quarter of one percent of the land. Montréal alone is 23.6 percent of the province's people on 0.04 percent of its area. At the other end, Nord-du-Québec is 707,115 square kilometres, more than half the province, and holds 45,740 people. The density gap between the two is more than sixty thousand to one.

This is why a single colour ramp across Quebec is close to useless. Almost every division outside the Saint Lawrence lowlands lands in the same bottom bucket. The Density view here uses class breaks rather than a linear ramp for that reason, and the chart above uses a log scale for the same one.

Where these boundaries come from

The Institut de la statistique du Québec publishes a harmonised version of the 2021 census geography for the province. It is the right source for a map like this because the boundaries, the populations and the land areas all come from one file that has already been reconciled against the census, rather than being stitched together from separate places.

There is a catch worth knowing about if you ever go looking for this data yourself. The census division layer in that file draws its boundaries out through the water. The Îles-de-la-Madeleine division comes out at 34,022 square kilometres if you take it at face value, because the boundary runs across the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The actual land is 187.

The fix is to work one level down. The dissemination area layer in the same file is drawn to the land, so dissolving those 13,845 small areas up into their ninety eight divisions gives boundaries that follow the coast. Montréal then comes out at 500 square kilometres against a census land figure of 498, and Laval at 246 against 246.

Clipping against a general coastline instead does not work at this scale. Tried that way, Montréal loses a fifth of its area and Laval loses a quarter, because both are river islands and a coastline generalised for world maps cuts their corners off.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

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

The farmland along the Saint Lawrence gives way to the boreal shield further north, and the change is visible as a colour break.

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 Montréal, the agglomeration and census division 2466.

Statistics Canada gives it 2,004,265 people and 498.14 square kilometres of land. Divide one by the other:

2,004,265 divided by 498.14 equals 4,023.5 people per square kilometre.

Select Montréal and the Selection panel reads 4,023.5. Switch to imperial and it becomes 10,420.8 per square mile.

Now add the ninety eight populations in the table. They come to 8,501,833, which is the published provincial total exactly.

Mistakes that catch people out

Using the city figure where the division is an agglomeration. It affects Montréal, Québec, Longueuil and La Tuque. Always check whether the number you have is the municipality or the division.

Treating the drawn area as land. Across the province the boundaries here enclose about twenty percent more than the census land area, and that difference is fresh water. Quebec has more of it than any other province: the Caniapiscau and Manicouagan reservoirs, the La Grande complex, Lac Mistassini and thousands of smaller lakes. Every density on this page is computed on census land area, and the Selection panel shows both figures so you can see the size of the effect on any division you pick.

Expecting the Saint Lawrence to appear as a line. Below Montréal it is mapped as open water rather than as a river centreline, so on this map it reads as the gap between the north shore and south shore divisions. That is how most reference maps show it too.

Assuming the northern boundary is settled. Quebec draws part of its north eastern limit differently from the boundary recognised by Newfoundland and Labrador, and the province publishes some of its northern divisions both ways. The figures here follow the census, and the small difference between the drawn area and the published provincial land area, about 0.17 percent, comes largely from this.

Expecting the projection to hold across the province. Quebec runs about 1,900 kilometres from the Vermont border to Ungava Bay. Montréal to Kuujjuaq measures 1,444.0 kilometres by great circle against 1,440.2 off the projected coordinates, an agreement of about one part in 380. The Maritime maps in this series hold to one part in several thousand because they cover a fraction of the distance.

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.
• Ontario Census Division Map: forty nine divisions next door, where separated cities leave holes in their counties.
• British Columbia Regional District Map: twenty nine districts clipped to the provincial land polygon.
• New Brunswick County Map: fifteen counties from the official provincial boundary file.
• Nova Scotia County Map: eighteen counties traced from the real shoreline.
• Prince Edward Island County Map: three counties, and the tightest agreement in the series between drawn area and census land.
• Statistics Canada Census Profile, 2021: the official source behind every population and land area figure on this page.

Boundaries, population and land area: Institut de la statistique du Québec, harmonised 2021 census geography, distributed through Données Québec, derived from Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population. Rivers: Natural Earth, public domain. Neither agency endorses this product.