Ontarians on the Move #5 — Who Commutes to Toronto for Work?

PREVIOUS ENTRY: Ontarians on the Move #4 — Durham.

TL;DR version: 2016 census data on commuting suggests where we should be looking, for young families moving away from Toronto is Halton, Simcoe and Dufferin in addition to York, Peel, and Durham.

Back in Part 1 in this series, we saw that there was a mass exodus of young families out of the City of Toronto, almost certainly because of a lack of housing:

Given that the most common age to leave Toronto is 0 (that is, under 12 months old), I believe it is a reasonable assumption that families are not leaving Toronto to look for a new job, but rather to find a house they can afford. Under the assumption that they’re moving to obtain housing, not moving for employment reasons, the obvious place to look is the census districts that border Toronto: York, Peel, and Durham:

As it turns out, young families are also leaving the Peel region, but the York and Durham region are “absorbing” some of these families:

However, the net effect is still an outflow of 50,000 people to the rest of the province, with young families leading the way:

So where else might they be going, given that many of them still work in Toronto?

Census 2016 contains a number of fantastic data tables on ‘journey to work’, examining the commuting patterns of Ontarians. I grabbed the data by census division (CD) for Ontario CDs, and looked for any CDs where at least 1% of workers commute to Toronto CD for work. As it turns out, this includes 20 of Ontario’s 49 CDs:

Other than the CDs we’ve examined so far, there are three where more than 5% of the workforce of the CD works in Toronto: Halton, Simcoe and Dufferin. Remember that this is 2016 data — I expect for many of these CDs the current proportion is even higher.

We also need to consider that many of these families leaving the Toronto area for housing elsewhere might work in Mississauga or Richmond Hill. I decided to cast a wider net and look for any CD where 10% of their resident workforce work in Toronto+York+Peel+Durham. There are 9 CDs which meet this criterion:

How to read this chart: 9.3% of workers living in Toronto commute to York for work, whereas 37.2% of workers living in York commute to Toronto for work. 80.9% of workers living in Toronto commute somewhere else in Toronto for work.

I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it’s rather remarkable that less than half of the workers living in Halton actually work in Halton. That’s an awful lot of commuters!

Speaking of Halton, that would seem to be the obvious next place to look for our Toronto families in search of housing, so let’s look there next.

COMING SOON: Ontarians on the Move #6 — Halton.