Where People Live

Population density across Canada (2021 Census)

Canada is an expansive country with a diverse physical geography. At 9.98 million km² it is the second-largest country on Earth, with the longest coastline of any nation. Canada also contains roughly a fifth of the world’s fresh water. That vast area is largely boreal forest, tundra, rock and ice. Most Canadians live in a narrow band within a few hundred kilometres of the southern border. The pages in this section map that geography: where people are, what the land is made of, where the water is, and how fire and ice are changing.

Sources are official: Statistics Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Canada in the world

How big is Canada, relative to every country in the world? By land area Canada is the world’s 4th-largest country, behind only Russia, China, and the United States. Add back its immense fresh water lakes and rivers and it rises to 2nd overall. Each dot below is a country, ranked by land area on a ratio (logarithmic) scale; Canada is in maroon.

Where Canadians live

Most Canadians live in a narrow band along the southern border. The country has dramatically fewer people living in its north. The map below shows that density pattern at the level of individual cities: density here is people per square kilometre within each census metropolitan area or agglomeration. This illustrates how compactly each city is built. Because the range spans several orders of magnitude it is shaded on a logarithmic scale (each step is ten times denser). Pan and zoom to your own region.

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