(Alfred Hecht)

Teaching aim: To demonstrate the particularities of the Canadian urban landscape, the importance of the CMAs in the urban and economic pattern as well as the variety of resource related towns in the present and the past. Keywords: Spatial distribution of cities, CMA, urban area, metropolis, national capital, regional metropolitan centres, industrial towns, resource towns, urban system, urban development, urban sprawl

It is difficult for a country as large as Canada to function efficiently. It is a problem of much space and a small population, not a simple problem to solve. Running the country is accomplished as well as possible through effective communications that facilitate the flow of goods, money, and information across the land, and by millions of government, economic, social, and cultural workers carrying out their responsibilities in urban centres, large and small. There are thousands of small centres, but if one wants to learn how the different parts of the whole country are related, one must examine the interrelationships of the large urban centres. Presently, about 60% of the Canadian population lived in the 25 largest urban centres, called census metropolitan areas (CMAs). As defined by the Canadian Census, a CMA is a very large urban area, together with adjacent urban and rural areas which have a high degree of economic and social integration with that urban area. The core of a CMA has at least 100,000 people [1]. There are in Canada four urban agglomerations that have populations over one million, Toronto [2], 4.3 million, Montreal [3], 3.3 million, Vancouver [4], 1.8 million, and Ottawa-Hull [5], 1 million. Together, these urban areas hold about 1/3 of Canada's population. Another five CMAs have populations between 500,000 and 1 million -- Edmonton [6], Calgary [7], Quebec [8], Hamilton [9], and Winnipeg [10]. Urban Canada like the rest of the Canadian ecumene is strong from East to West just north of the USA border.

The two national metropolitan centres, and the national capital, are in central Canada. For about a century after the 1850s, Montreal was the prime metropolitan centre of Canada; financial power, national transportation companies, considerable manufacturing, and trade were centred there. During the mid-twentieth century and the years thereafter, banking control, an increasingly powerful stock exchange, and head offices of other financial interests emerged in Toronto, and that city has become the undisputed economic centre of Canada, although Montreal still remains strong. Ottawa, as the national capital, has a great impact as well in guiding the economic development of the country, in areas such as tariff legislation and trade agreements, providing funds for improved communications infrastructure, regulating many aspects of economic development, and establishing economic relations with other countries.

In Atlantic Canada, Halifax emerged after 1900 as the regional metropolitan centre with many federal government departments and agencies, and numerous national companies have located their regional head offices there. It is also the capital of Nova Scotia. Saint John, New Brunswick, Moncton, Fredericton the capital of New Brunswick, Charlottetown the capital of Prince Edward Island, and St. John's, the capital of Newfoundland are other important regional centres in Atlantic Canada. Montreal is the dominant centre in Quebec, but Quebec City remains significant as the capital. In southeastern Quebec, Sherbrooke and in northern Quebec Chicoutimi-Jonquière, serve considerable regions, as does Trois-Rivières, an industrial centre located between Montreal and Quebec City. In industrial and agricultural southern Ontario, numerous urban centres have shown consistent growth in the shadow of Toronto, the capital of the province as well as Canada's leading metropolis, serving their local areas and also growing as service and manufacturing places. This includes London, Hamilton, St. Catharines-Niagara, Kitchener, Windsor and Oshawa. In northern Ontario, Sudbury, Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie are regional centres in a wilderness area of forest, mineral, and recreational resources.

In the Prairies, Winnipeg grew rapidly as the gateway to the agricultural interior of Canada and its commercial centre, and as the capital of Manitoba. Winnipeg's regional metropolitan role was steadily curtailed after a large oil field was discovered in Alberta in the 1940s, and Calgary and Edmonton took over as leading cities. Calgary is the administrative centre of the Canadian oil industry, and has increasingly becoming a head office town for many national enterprises, and Edmonton is the capital of Alberta and the gateway to the Canadian North West. Lethbridge Medicine Hat and Red Deer are local regional centres in southern Alberta, and Grande Prairie and Fort McMurray in northern Alberta. In Saskatchewan, Regina the capital, and Saskatoon a growing resource centre, have not kept pace with the major Alberta centres, and have not caught up with Winnipeg. British Columbia is dominated by the great Pacific coast port and commercial centre, Vancouver. It is expanding rapidly as Canada's gateway to the Pacific rim, and is increasingly perceived within Canada and internationally as a fascinating, large diversified city, beginning to be similar in magnitude and in the attention it commands to Toronto and Montreal. Victoria the provincial capital, along with Vancouver emphasizes the power southwestern British Columbia has within the province. Elsewhere in British Columbia, the local regional centres include Kelowna and Kamloops  in the south, Prince George in the interior, and Prince Rupert the only other mainland Pacific port other than Vancouver, in the north.

In northern Canada there are no major cities comparable to those in southern Canada. However, relative to the total northern population and to the area served, there are very important regional centres in different parts of the North. Whitehorse is the capital of Yukon, and Yellowknife of Northwest Territories. Iqaluit on Baffin Island, will become the capital of the territory of Nunavut in 1999. Other significant centres, mainly serving Inuit populations, are Rankin Inlet on the west coast of Hudson Bay, and Inuvik near the mouth of the Mackenzie River on the Arctic Ocean.

For a closer look at each of these cities or other communities in terms of their population, educational and job characterisitics the reader can take a look at the web site put on by statistics Canada for all urban and rural communities using their 1996 data base.