Canada’s Parks, Mapped

The boundaries of every national, provincial, and territorial park in Canada

This map shows the boundaries of Canada’s several hundred national, provincial, and territorial parks, coloured by which level of government manages them. Zoom and pan to explore, and hover any park for its name. The southern provinces hold hundreds of smaller parks; the largest are in the North and the mountain West.

The coloured fills are reported park boundaries from the Canadian Protected and Conserved Areas Database (CPCAD), compiled from federal, provincial, and territorial submissions. Two limits are worth keeping in mind. First, the picture is not exhaustive. Coverage varies by jurisdiction and some smaller parks are absent. Second, CPCAD maps the formally protected land, which for a zoned park is only its protected core: a few large parks can therefore look smaller or more fragmented than the full park on a road or canoe map. This notably affects some parks in Ontario, such as Algonquin. The fills cover terrestrial parks, and are illustrative, not legal.

Over the national parks and the provincial and territorial parks of most jurisdictions, a second layer traces the official boundary defined by the responsible agency: legislated for the national parks (including the Rouge National Urban Park and the Saguenay–St. Lawrence Marine Park), regulated or set by Order-in-Council for the provincial ones. Use the legend to turn this layer on or off. It often matches the reported fill, but where the two diverge the gap is informative.

Algonquin, recorded in CPCAD as only its protected core, appears here as the single regulated park it legally is — the official boundary larger than the reported fill.

Rouge diverges the other way since it is still legally assembling its full expected area. Its boundary currently stops short of Lake Ontario. The southern lands down to the shore are managed by Parks Canada but are not yet in the legal schedule. As a result, they appear only in the reported fill beneath.

A few jurisdictions do not publish open boundary data, so their parks appear only as the reported CPCAD fill. The Ottawa Greenbelt is an interesting case. The Ottawa Greenbelt is the National Capital Commission’s band of conservation land and farmland around the capital. Here it is drawn as its own layer, since it is protected greenspace rather than a park.

The Ontario Greenbelt appears the same way: a band of permanently protected countryside, farmland, and natural areas stretching across the Greater Golden Horseshoe. This covers more than 800,000 hectares, taking in the Niagara Escarpment and the Oak Ridges Moraine, and was established under Ontario’s Greenbelt Act in 2005. It is a land-use designation that restricts development rather than a park, so it too carries its own colour and legend entry. The Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation publishes detailed maps of the Greenbelt.

This is a detailed, heavier map kept on its own page so the Protected & Conserved Areas overview stays light.

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