The Rural Ontario Institute has created a new series of factsheets supported by interactive dashboards that includes statistics, maps and other visualizations that make it easy distinguish between urban and rural and understand rural and urban trends.
Data Analyst, Danielle Letang, says the first dashboard and fact sheet relates to geography and they have been released and are available on their web site now.
She says the key take-aways are that almost 2.5 million people in Ontario live in a rural municipality. There are 469 rural municipalities in Ontario and about 96 per cent of Ontario's land area is covered by rural municipalities.
“Most of Ontario's land area is rural. Most of Ontario's population is urban. It's not really a secret that Ontario's population is concentrated in large, urban centres but those large urban centres make up a very small proportion of the total land area,” said Letang. “As more people move to rural areas, those areas can then be re-classified as urban. So we did see that since 2016, Ontario's population grew by around 780-thousand people, but that growth was mostly concentrated in urban areas.”
Letang one of the recent trends is the number of people who are now able to work from their homes and how that has encouraged a number of people to move out of the city and into the country.
And as more people move to rural areas, those areas can then be re-classified as urban. So they have seen that since 2016, Ontario's population grew by around 780,000 people, but that growth was mostly concentrated in urban areas.
Letang says one of their goals is that the dashboards and factsheets will help make decision-makers, policy-makers and the general public aware of just how rural Ontario really is.
