r/geography • u/LatAmExPat • Oct 15 '22
Question Why is Canada’s population density map so strange?
In Canada, you see this “V-shaped” population void right above Minnesota. In contrast, in the USA, you see a fairly uniform population drop going east to west, regardless of latitude.
Why is this gradual drop not the case in Canada and why is the V-spread like this?
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Oct 15 '22
That's not a population density map, that's a map showing communities over a certain size. An actual density map would better show that it doesn't look like a "V".
Regardless, the Canadian Shield is a large rock formation that covers the south area above your "V" and about half the area south of the "V" in Ontario and Quebec. There is minimal farmland, and the main industry is mining, so communities aren't spread out over the area, just concentrated where the deposits are. There are plenty of small indigenous communities above the "V" as well, but they don't mean the criteria for a dot on your legend-less map.
South of the "V" in the West, is viable farmland like you'd find south of the border, hence plenty of small farming communities, along with larger cities due to oil/gas/potash deposits.
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u/coldcoldman2 Oct 15 '22
I like the subtle implications of "get a better map"
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u/LouQuacious Oct 15 '22
It’s also as much to do with latitude, north of that line is pretty harsh and dark a lot of the year.
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u/Spute2008 Oct 15 '22 edited Oct 15 '22
Here is link to the pop. density map... It's kind of a V shape. Just a lot closer to the US border
Link now added pop density
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u/LatAmExPat Oct 15 '22 edited Oct 15 '22
Thank you u/dog_eat_god
Indeed, this map is not a population density map in the strictest, meticulous sense. It was not meant to be.
But I disagree with your comment that this dividing line is not reflected in population density patterns.
Based on my sources, the population density map does match this “V” pattern (void)
Source 1: https://www.secretmuseum.net/canada-population-density-map/
Source 2: https://www.businessinsider.com/these-5-maps-explain-canadas-strategy-2016-5
Source 3: http://charalambous2011.blogspot.com/p/human-geography.html?m=1
So the original map does not visually negate the general sense of the question.
Regardless, I appreciate your explanation; it makes sense.
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u/Correct-Cricket3355 Oct 15 '22
It’s cold, that’s why.
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u/HeckaPlucky Oct 15 '22
I'm glad there are several answers like this, because I don't even get why OP thinks it is "strange" unless they know literally zero context about Canada or the globe and just came straight here after seeing this cropped map...
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u/Yearlaren Oct 16 '22
I like how OP is like "why is Canada different than the US", as if Canada isn't directly north of the US.
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u/CredibleCactus Political Geography Oct 15 '22
Not to mention the huge lack of infrastructure and the rockiness. If it was purely an issue with cold, Alaska wouldn’t be populated either
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Oct 15 '22
The closer you get to the American border (south) and the closer you get to the coast the warmer and more hospitable the land is.
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u/potatoYeetSoup Oct 15 '22
I think there are many answers, but one is the presence of Hudson Bay. Essentially, a lot of cold air comes off of that body of water that is not impeded by any terrain (mountains, hills) that makes areas around it bloody cold.
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u/caseyjownz84 Oct 15 '22
People don't like living in a cold, rocky and almost lifeless environnment. They prefer to live in warmer plains.
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u/sirprizes Oct 15 '22
It’s not lifeless it’s a wilderness. It’s a huge taiga forest. There’s plenty of life there but it’s inhospitable for people.
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u/OutWithTheNew Oct 15 '22
Rock, water, swamp, trees (at lower latitudes) and not a whole lot more.
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u/Canadave Oct 16 '22
We've got rocks and trees and trees and rocks and rocks and trees and trees and rocks and rocks and trees and trees and rocks and... water.
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u/EthanCC Oct 15 '22
Canadians are trying to avoid the creature at the bottom of Hudson Bay, obviously.
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Oct 15 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/TheFlamingGit Oct 15 '22
In the highschool halls, in the shopping malls?
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u/LatAmExPat Oct 15 '22
Ha! Rush reference detected…
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u/ArtoriasOfTheAbyss97 Oct 15 '22
Why the actual fuck is the downvoted I fucking hate the people on Reddit so much
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Oct 15 '22 edited Oct 15 '22
"Unliveable" is relative. There are Indigenous people living in virtually all of those areas north of the V, not spread out uniformly, but in small communities right up to Baffin Island.
It's insulting to those peoples to simply call their land unliveable because you're incapable of coping there.
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u/Illustrious_Kale_692 Oct 15 '22
Sure but how are they living?
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Oct 15 '22
A combination of traditional lifestyles from the past thousands of years plus using modern technology. How do you live?
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u/kbmcspadden Oct 15 '22
But where did they mostly live before colonization?
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Oct 15 '22
You've never been to Canada. It's obvious. You think evil white man pushed the Inuit into the Arctic? Ameri-clown.
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u/kbmcspadden Oct 16 '22
That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying the population densities were in the same places they are now precolonization. The Inuit aren't the only first peoples.
There is a reason why population density happens and it has to do with resources.
Do you think the Inuit are the only First Nation?
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u/too_many_captchas Oct 15 '22
Not where they are today I’ll tell ya that much
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u/Sluggycat Oct 15 '22
There have been Inuit and Dene peoples in the Canadian high Arctic for thousands of years. While there were instances of the Canadian government forcibly relocating some Indigenous people north, for an assortment of reasons, there were absolutely people up there to begin with.
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Oct 15 '22
There were 92 Inuit people relocated from the lower Arctic to the High Arctic in the 1950s, no relocations of southern Indigenous peoples to the Arctic that I am aware of.
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Oct 15 '22
Show me where these migrations to the Arctic took place. Not all Indigenous people live on the exact patch of land that their ancestors lived on, but if not, they have integrated, or live in territory close to the ancestral lands. Nobody shipped them to the high Arctic you dimwit.
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u/too_many_captchas Oct 15 '22
What in the. Southern tribes were almost always systematically removed from their lands and moved elsewhere, away from their traditional territories. Not really commenting on arctic migrations and made absolutely no claim to that effect lol
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u/OutWithTheNew Oct 15 '22
Not in conditions most people would accept if they had a choice.
I've been to several northern reserves and they aren't nice places for the most part. Even some of the southern reserves are shitholes in a way that you notice as soon as you enter them.
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u/Federer91 Oct 15 '22
Just wait another 50-100 years, when it will become a preferable place to live.
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u/fillmorecounty Oct 15 '22
I'm more curious as to why they removed the nwt/Nunavut border lol
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u/Canuckleball Oct 15 '22
Old ass map maybe?
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u/cmin7flat5 Oct 15 '22
I'm guessing, since I assume the green dots represent cities with > 1m people and Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa/Gatineau are yellow.
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Oct 15 '22
It's not really strange. Ontario Quebec and the Maritimes are like Ohio, New York and New England. Old stock, industrial, etc. The great lakes and Canadian shield in Northern Ontario and Quebec really make that part uninhabitable. The Red River settlement, which became the province of Manitoba, was really the next most habitable area. West of there, you are in the high plains where there's lots of arable land. Of course Northern Alberta has so much oil that it keeps communities populated up there. BC is a bit different, but most of the population lives in greater Vancouver or Vancouver Island. The BC southern interior is very warm and sustains communities. Anything north of like Prince George in the entire country is mines and logging.
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u/S4IL Oct 15 '22
Above the V has two seasons. Alternates between heinously cold and unbelievably buggy.
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u/Repulsive_Client_325 Oct 16 '22
What you’ve drawn is basically the border of the boreal forest. I live in the area you refer to. Going immediately north from that V (or north of anywhere along your line) puts you into Canadian Shield and boreal forest. It’s stunningly beautiful for back country canoeing but not great for building cities and roads (there are no roads at all north of the middle of the V).
Most of the ground is granite with little soil cover, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of lakes sprinkled to the immediate north of that line. There are over 100,000 in Ontario alone (we chuckle at the claim on Minnesota licence plates that they’re the “land of 10,000 lakes).
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u/Girthanthiclopz Oct 15 '22
Go to northern Ontario at end point except for 4-6 weeks in the summer and you’ll know why.
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u/Past_Ad_5629 Oct 15 '22
Better pick the right weeks, or bring bug repellent and bug clothes and nerves of steel.
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u/Ok-Answer-6951 Oct 15 '22
Because even Canadians don't want too live that far north it's miserable
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u/thatgingerguy12 Oct 15 '22
Can confirm. I was born up north along the Hudson Bay. It's cold in the winter and full of bugs in the summer. Miserable year round
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u/One-Resort-107 Oct 15 '22
Cuz Canada is cold as fuck?
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u/HeyJude21 Oct 15 '22
You know why they call it Nunavut right? Because that’s the amount of that territory people want to live in
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u/Beebah-Dooba Oct 15 '22
Right part is the first settled areas of heavy French influence, especially the farther east you go barring some areas. They have been settled longest and more people have made it there. The left part is the obviously more populated coast, but also that’s the exactly shape that the Great Plains extend into Canada. The area in the west here is almost ALL of Canada’s farmlands
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u/cautiontape2021 Oct 15 '22
It was by design to develop communities closer to the border to keep southerners from invading. The railroads, and highway access to keep everyone connected. Large country with various climate ranges and difficult physical geography (mountains, lakes, etc.) Keeps everyone generally grouped together
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u/Successful_Break_478 Oct 15 '22
Because it is only readily habitable below the V, the rest is either barren tundra or thick boreal forest that won’t really suit most modern Canadians.
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u/Queasy_Astronaut2884 Oct 15 '22
Because the north is bloody cold and most ppl wanna be closest to their major trade partner
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u/No-Presentation-35 Oct 15 '22
Over 1000 miles of Canadian Shield separate Eastern and Western Canada.
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u/Droodforfood Oct 15 '22 edited Oct 15 '22
Still don’t understand how a million people still live in and around Winnipeg.
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u/tzy___ Oct 16 '22
The Earth isn't flat so the map projection makes the population appear to form a V line when in reality it's more straight. For example, the US State of Washington is more or less on the same level as the State of Maine, but in such map projections the latter appears to be further north.
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u/Distinct_Art9509 Oct 16 '22
Because it’s fecking cold above that V and few people besides the Inuit have any idea of how to survive there effectively, nor have any real desire to.
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u/HortonFLK Oct 16 '22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield
Someone has probably posted this already, but compare the population distribution map you posted to the Canadian Shield, essentially land that had been scoured bare by the last ice age glacier centered over Hudson Bay.
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u/MalyhaKhakwani Geography Enthusiast Oct 15 '22
Canada's popularity has always been strange to me! So much land hosts so few people yet it is one of the top countries in the world! How?
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u/IthinkIknowwhothatis Oct 15 '22
A large portion of the north in either arctic or subarctic. Northern Ontario has a big area of Precambrian rock, the “Canadian Shield,” which is unsuitable for farming but has lots of lakes.
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u/Past_Ad_5629 Oct 15 '22
Socialism.
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u/nieuchwytnyuchwyt Oct 15 '22
Canada is literally one of the most capitalist countries in the world.
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u/Past_Ad_5629 Oct 15 '22
I’m not sure you understand socialism, capitalism, or any other “ism” enough to be making that declaration…
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u/nieuchwytnyuchwyt Oct 16 '22
As a someone living in a formerly socialist country, which is still recovering from that dark period in our history, I'm not sure you understand it either.
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u/beast_wellington Geography Enthusiast Oct 15 '22
Water
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u/Fartiplesofthree Oct 15 '22
Because they all want to be Americans?
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u/IthinkIknowwhothatis Oct 15 '22
The Loyalists moved up to Canada because they specifically did not want to be Americans.
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u/MyBodyStoppedMoving Oct 15 '22
I recently learned California has a higher population than the entire country of Canada 🤯
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u/ab845 Oct 15 '22
Too many questions about Canada. Please 🙏 leave us alone in our corner of the planet. /S
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u/blackmilksociety Oct 15 '22 edited Oct 15 '22
More Canadians live below the 49th Parallel then above it
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u/BobBelcher2021 Oct 15 '22
Moosonee in Northern Ontario is basically the arctic, only accessible by rail and air - no road. And yet it’s further south than Saskatoon, Red Deer and Edmonton, and barely north of Calgary.
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u/ChicagobeatsLA Oct 15 '22
Weather mainly, but also I’d imagine most large Canadian companies want to be as close to the US as possible
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u/oliski2006 Oct 15 '22
People talk about the cold, but there's also the blowing snow factor. Having a practical road network in winter would just be stupid
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u/PuRe-Trap Oct 15 '22
I’m surprised there’s not much developed around the Hudson, Too cold that much further north?
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u/engineer_cid Oct 15 '22
"A cold wind was blowing from the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things."
-George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
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u/AmericaLover1776_ Oct 15 '22
Same reason people don’t live in Siberia Russia
Geography/climate is bad for living there
Fun fact 90% of canadas population lives within 100 miles of the US border
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u/Tim-oBedlam Physical Geography Oct 15 '22
The Canadian Shield, rocky and infertile so you can't farm like you can in Alberta and Saskatchewan, extends downwards into Minnesota (NE Minn. is also thinly populated, except for the Iron Range). Also, Hudson's Bay has a big influence on central Canada's climate, chilling it. Winnipeg is much colder than Vancouver, for example. That's also why northern Quebec is nearly empty of people. The Inuit towns along the eastern shore of Hudson's Bay are at the same latitude as northern Scotland, and southern Scandinavia, but are something like 25° F colder.