Ontarians on the Move #2 — York

PREVIOUS ENTRY: Ontarians on the Move #1 — Toronto.

TL;DR version: At a high-level, the trends for York look similar to those of Toronto. But unlike Toronto, we see kids moving there and 20 somethings move away.

The Census Division of York is simply the York Region, which is comprised of the following nine municipalities:

York and Toronto grew at nearly identical rates between July 1, 2018 and July 1, 2019. Fortunately, Statscan made available population estimates for census subdivisions, so we can see that growth was uneven across the region, with East Gwillimbury experiencing 10% gain.

Unfortunately, we don’t have components of population growth by subdivision, but we can see that a division level, the high level data looks similar to Toronto, with two exceptions:

The level of immigration to the York Region is proportionally smaller than in Toronto (though still quite high!) and the net intraprovincial (within Ontario) migration loss is substantially smaller but still negative.

Here’s international migration to York by age:

Looks similar to the data for Toronto, though there’s a big spike of highschool aged kids. Does anyone know the story behind this?

And here’s the data for migration within Canada:

The net intraprovincial pattern is significantly different than Toronto — we see a big outflow of 20 somethings and an inflow of kids. The outflow of people aged 45–65 is interesting. People cashing out of their properties and moving farther away? Not entirely sure what’s going on.

Adding all the migration categories together, here’s what we get:

Outside of a small outflow of people in the 50s, it is increases across-the-board, which people in the early 30s being the largest cohort.

I’d like to go back to the intraprovincial numbers. Check out the contrast between Toronto and York.

If we combine the two, we see that there’s still a net outflow of kids and 30-somethings out of the combined Toronto+York region:

Of course, there are two other census divisions that border Toronto: Peel and Durham; Toronto families may be moving there as well. So in the next piece, we’ll add Peel.

NEXT IN THE SERIES: Ontarians on the Move #3 — Peel.