Proceedings of the Subcommittee on Cities
Issue 1 - Evidence, March 29, 2007
OTTAWA, Thursday, March 29, 2007
The Subcommittee on Cities of the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 10:47 a.m. to examine and report on current social issues pertaining to Canada's largest cities.
Senator Art Eggleton (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: We will get under way.
[Translation]
Welcome to the first committee of the subcommittee on cities. I am very enthusiastic about the work we are about to begin.
[English]
We begin today with an indication of some of the trends in urbanization in Canada by having Statistics Canada with us. Their recent report got a lot of media attention and it fits well into our examination of the cities agenda, so we have them here in great numbers, as you see.
Welcome. Please proceed.
Garnett Picot, Director General, Socio-Economic and Business Analysis, Statistics Canada: Thank you very much. We are happy to be here.
This is a topic of interest to us. Aside from the recent release to which the Chairman referred, in 2004-05 we produced about nine reports on trends and conditions in cities. We hope to update those reports over the coming two years as more census data become available.
Today we want to talk about social conditions and what you referred to in your background note as social capacity. There are obviously many subjects we could address so we had to pick and choose.
We will talk about the following areas: population growth — and we have very recent data from the new 2006 census in the report to which the Chairman referred; immigrant settlement and economic outcomes of immigrants in the major cities; low income in the cities; a bit about crime rates; and a little about cities and economic development. That is a lot of ground to cover and we have many cities to talk about. We cannot cover them all, but during the presentation we will pick selected cities and indicate whether a particular trend applies to all cities or is unique to a given city.
As I mentioned, we have very recent data for population growth, but we have less current data for the other topics because most of those topics rely on census data and the last census was 2001. Over the coming year, we will be releasing a lot more data on these other issues and we will lay out the schedule for you. I thought I should let you know where we stand on data availability.
We have three presenters. We will start with Grant Schellenberg, who will tell us about population change in cities.
Grant Schellenberg, Senior Analyst, Social and Aboriginal Statistics, Statistics Canada: I want to begin by defining the key concept that will guide this discussion. Statistics Canada uses several definitions to describe urban areas. The census metropolitan area, or CMA, is most commonly used and will be the primary geographic concept used in this presentation. A census metropolitan area is an area with a population of at least 100,000 people including an urban core with a population of at least 50,000. Between 2001 and 2006, the number of CMAs in Canada increased from 27 to 33. It is important to note that CMAs usually consist or often consist of many municipalities.
On the next slide, results from the 2006 census show that Canada is highly urbanized with over two thirds of the population residing in one of Canada's 33 census metropolitan areas. Another 13 per cent of the population resides in mid-sized urban centres, those with populations of approximately 10,000 to 100,000. Finally, 19 per cent reside in small town and rural areas.
Six CMAs — Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa-Gatineau, Calgary and Edmonton — each have more than 1 million residents now. Between 1996 and 2006, the share of Canada's population in those six largest CMAs increased from 42 per cent to 45 per cent. In this respect, Canada's population is becoming increasingly concentrated in these largest urban centres.
Chart 4 shows the rate at which CMAs are growing, and between 2001 and 2006 there was considerable variation in this regard. As you will see on this chart, furthest to the left, the population of Barrie, one of Canada's newest CMAs, increased by almost 20 per cent over the five-year period.
Calgary, Oshawa and Edmonton had rates of growth in excess of 10 per cent over this period and another 11 CMAs had population growth rates above the national average of 5.4 per cent.
Only two CMAs, Saint John and Saguenay, experienced decline in their populations between 2001 and 2006.
A second key point from this chart is that the rate of population growth has been well above the national average in Canada's 33 CMAs at almost 7 per cent, and I would also note that in the six largest CMAs, the rate of growth was approaching 8 per cent. In contrast, population growth in mid-sized urban centres at 4 per cent and in rural and small towns at 1 per cent was far below the national average. Growth is concentrated in the largest CMAs.
The population of CMAs continues to spread geographically and this is evident in two ways. First, peripheral municipalities within CMAs are growing more rapidly than central municipalities; I will show you that on a map in just a moment. Second, outside the CMAs, we find that rural areas located close to CMAs grew more rapidly at almost 5 per cent, while rural areas further away grew more slowly. The same point could be made with respect to mid-size urban centres, with many of the fastest growing smaller centres being located within 100 kilometres of Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, or close to other CMAs. In this respect, CMAs are very much engines of growth.
On the next slide, the spatial aspect of population growth can be demonstrated using the CMA of Toronto. There is a lot happening in this chart, but I want to point out one key issue here. On this chart, the municipality of Toronto is located in that bottom cluster. The municipality of Toronto grew by less than 1 per cent between 2001 and 2006.
Only 5 per cent of the total population growth in the CMA of Toronto was located in that municipality. If we consider the five municipalities that surround the municipality of Toronto, up and slightly to the right on the map, we have Markham, and circling around to the left, we see Richmond Hill, Vaughan and Brampton. In each of those municipalities, population growth was generally between 25 per cent and 30 per cent, compared to less than 1 per cent in the municipality of Toronto itself. If we include Mississauga in this group, we find that 70 per cent of the population growth in the CMA of Toronto was located in those five municipalities in that first ring around the municipality of Toronto. That is a growth of 300,000 people over a net growth of 430,000 people in the CMA of Toronto.
Another 25 per cent of the growth in the CMA of Toronto occurred in municipalities even further out. The point here is the geographic spread. The same pattern is evident in many other large CMAs, and in the next slide we show this for Calgary. We could show it for many other municipalities. The central point is that the most rapid rates of growth are in outlying areas.
These geographic patterns of growth have important implications for transportation and commuting. Employment growth is mirroring population growth, with the fastest growth occurring away from the downtown core. Using Toronto as an example, between 1996 and 2001, more than 200,000 jobs were created in Toronto at locations further than 20 kilometres from the city centre.
We will be able to update that data when the new census becomes available. For those 200,000 jobs located further than 20 kilometres from the city centre, 90 per cent of the workers go to work by car and only 7 per cent by public transit.
Over the same period, 73,000 jobs were created in Toronto at locations within five kilometres of the city centre; 23 per cent of the workers in those jobs commuted by car, while 64 per cent commuted by public transit. The same patterns are evident in many other large CMAs, as are the challenges they pose for transportation.
Thus far we talked about the rate of growth and some of the spatial aspects of growth. I now want to touch on some of the demographic reasons why CMAs are growing. These demographic factors vary across CMAs.
Population growth in some CMAs has resulted primarily from people moving from elsewhere in Canada. That can include movement into the CMA from elsewhere in the province or interprovincial movement. Examples of CMAs growing because of this type of movement include Moncton, Barrie, Brantford, Oshawa and Kelowna.
Population growth in other CMAs has resulted primarily from immigration. The best known examples here include Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, but immigration has also been a factor in other CMAs such as Abbotsford, Sherbrooke, Hamilton, and London.
Population growth in some CMAs has resulted from both these factors; Calgary and Edmonton with their booming economies are good examples.
I want to turn our attention to the issue of immigration in Canada's CMAs. In 2001, 94 per cent of all of the immigrants who had arrived in Canada during the 1990s settled in one of Canada's 27 CMAs at that point in time. Moreover, immigrants have become increasingly concentrated in Canada's largest census metropolitan areas, particularly Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
For example, 33 per cent of the immigrants who arrived during the 1970s settled in Toronto. These are immigrants who had been there ten years or less. Of the immigrants who arrived in the 1990s, 43 per cent settled in Toronto, a 9- percentage-point increase. In Vancouver we see the same pattern, with the proportion of the immigrants settling in Vancouver increasing from 11 per cent to almost 18 per cent over this time frame. Overall, if we consider Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver in combination, the share of immigrants settling there increased from 58 per cent to 73 per cent between 1981 and 2001.
Finally, it is important to note that since the early 1980s, the source countries have shifted away from the United States and Western Europe toward countries in Asia, and this is reflected in the face of Canada's largest census metropolitan areas. In 2001, visible minorities accounted for about a third of the populations of Toronto and Vancouver and demographic projections at Statistics Canada project this share to increase to about 50 per cent in these two CMAs by 2017.
At this point my colleague Andrew Heisz will look at the other changes in the characteristics and experiences of immigrants in Canada's CMAs.
Andrew Heisz, Senior Research Economist, Business and Labour Market Analysis, Statistics Canada: I will start my portion of this talk by discussing a bit further the issue of immigrant selection and integration into the labour market.
In the early 1990s, the immigrant selection process was adjusted to encourage the entry of those immigrants most likely to succeed in a knowledge-based economy. These changes dramatically affected the characteristics of the immigrant labour supply in the ways intended.
For example, this chart shows that immigrants have been entering Canada with higher credentials. The left panel shows the share of immigrants by their educational attainment. The right panel shows the share of immigrants by their admissions category. The left panel shows that the educational attainment of landed immigrants in their year of immigration rose dramatically. The percentage of those with university degrees rose from 16.9 per cent in 1992 to 44 per cent in 2007. There were many more university graduates entering Canada among the immigrants in 2004 than there were in 1992.
The right panel shows similar statistics by admission category, skilled workers, families and refugees, and people admitted into each of those categories in each of those years. It is clear that many more were entering in the skilled economic class in 2004 than in 1992. For example, the number of skilled workers rose from 28.8 per cent of all immigrants who arrived in 1992 to 51 per cent in 2004.
However, despite this improvement in the credentials of new immigrants, their labour market success has been on the decline. The next graph shows the earnings of recent immigrants relative to the Canadian-born. Looking at data for 1980, immigrants who arrived in Canada between 1976 and 1980 earned between 70 per cent and 80 per cent of the Canadian-born, depending on which CMA we examine. However, this declined across the 1980s, bottoming out at about 50 per cent of the Canadian-born workers' earnings in 1995.
The earnings of recent immigrants rebounded somewhat in the late 1990s with the high-tech boom, but in 2004 their earnings remained at 60 per cent of those of Canadian-born workers.
The next slide shows the low-income rate, which is among the most watched of socio-economic indicators. This chart describes low-income rates among specific groups, in particular recent immigrants, other immigrants, Aboriginal people and lone-parent families. It shows that low-income rates are particularly high among recent immigrants, Aboriginal people and lone-parent families.
For example, for all persons, the low-income rate in the year 2000 was 16.7 per cent. However, for recent immigrants, the low-income rate was double that at 32.2 per cent. For Aboriginal people, the low-income rate was about 2.5 times the rate of all persons at 39.4 per cent.
Senator Cordy: Sorry to interrupt, but can you tell us what your definition of a recent immigrant is? Is it within a year or five years?
Mr. Heisz: In this case, the definition of recent immigrants is within the last ten years, the ten years preceding 2000, so this particular table speaks about those who immigrated in the 1990s.
Lone-parent family persons have a low-income rate that is almost three times that of all persons.
CMAs have widely varying compositions of Aboriginal people and immigrants, which raises an important issue for delivery of services for low-income persons. As shown earlier, recent immigrants are highly concentrated in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, as well as in some other CMAs. On the other hand, Aboriginal people are highly concentrated in Northern Ontario and in many Western CMAs like Winnipeg, Regina and Saskatoon. Those differences will mean that the face of low income varies across CMAs.
That is the point we try to make in the next slide. Each of these pie charts represents the percentage of low income by group for Aboriginal people, recent immigrants, other immigrants and others within a selected CMA. For example, in the case of Halifax, a relatively small share of their low-income population is Aboriginal people. Moreover, a relatively small share of their low-income population is recent or other immigrants. Most of their low-income population falls into the others category, which is other Canadian-born.
Toronto, for example, a city that receives a much higher share of recent immigrants than other CMAs, also has a disproportionately high share of recent immigrants in their low-income population, but they have relatively small shares of Aboriginal people in their population.
Other CMAs that receive many immigrants, like Vancouver, will have a similar pattern.
Senator Nancy Ruth: What is an ``other immigrant?''
Mr. Heisz: ``Other immigrant'' is somebody who is not a recent immigrant, so anyone who immigrated more than ten years ago.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Would that statistic be tied to age?
Mr. Heisz: Yes.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Are they out of the workforce?
Mr. Heisz: Some of them would be.
Senator Nancy Ruth: That is a huge number, 36 per cent. Who are they?
Mr. Heisz: My sense is that they would be slightly older than recent immigrants, although while recent immigrants tend to be younger than other immigrants, some recent immigrants are older as well. They will be older than recent immigrants in general.
The situation for Winnipeg was somewhat different, reflecting the large Aboriginal community in that CMA. In Winnipeg, 23.8 per cent of their low-income population were Aboriginal people, compared to relatively small shares that were recent immigrants or other immigrants. By relatively small, I mean in comparison to Toronto.
Other CMAs with large Aboriginal populations, like Regina and Saskatoon, will show similar patterns. These differences in the face of low income across CMAs may be a challenge to those wishing to compose a national strategy to address low income. That also suggests that any solution might need to be tailored toward the diverse needs of particular communities.
In the next map, we raise the issue of the location of low-income neighbourhoods in the CMA. This shows the CMA of Toronto. The location of low-income neighbourhoods in the larger CMAs is of concern because we want know whether they are clustered together in the downtown core or are disbursed throughout the CMA. We know that the central cities of Canadian CMAs have not grown as fast as the suburbs and some have declined. That raises the question of whether low income has become concentrated in the downtown cores of Canadian cities as it has in some U.S. cities. It also raises implications for the location of delivery of services for low-income persons.
In this chart we see neighbourhoods in the CMA of Toronto. There are two colours on the chart. The bright red indicates neighbourhoods where the low-income rate was more than 40 per cent, whereas the paler red shows neighbourhoods where the low-income rate was between 30 per cent and 40 per cent. That is taken from the 2000 census.
In the case of Toronto, we see a distinct pocket of low income found in the downtown core; however, low-income neighbourhoods are also dispersed throughout the metropolitan area. We would call that a decentralized pattern of low income. There are few lower-income neighbourhoods the geographic centre of the city and very few farther out in the suburbs. That is an instance of a census metropolitan area that has several distinct clusters of low income that surround a relatively affluent city centre.
The situation in Winnipeg, which is represented on the next map, indicates another type of pattern that we see in some other census metropolitan areas in Canada. In Winnipeg, the low-income neighbourhoods are highly centralized. We see a similar pattern in Hamilton.
We also note that CMAs can change over time. Between 1980 and 2000, we noted in our study that Montreal turned from a single central cluster of low-income neighbourhoods to a city with more dispersed neighbourhoods as downtown Montreal underwent an economic transformation from low-income to high-income neighbourhoods in the city centre.
We see that there is not one single model of location of low-income neighbourhoods that prevails in Canadian cities. Some cities have a decentralized pattern whereas other cities have a centralized pattern.
I will speak briefly now about crime in CMAs. This graph represents the trend in the total crime rate over the past decade for all CMAs combined. It shows the incidence of crime as reported to police expressed as a rate per 100,000 population. It shows that in 1996 the rate per 100,000 population was about 9,000 reported crimes. That fell across the period to about 7,300 by 2005. You can see that there has been a general decline.
However, what is notable is that crime in these big cities has actually been decreasing more than in non-CMA areas. Crime is not necessarily a big-city phenomenon. For example, the nine largest CMAs accounted for about 50 per cent of the population in 2005, yet they accounted for only about 47 per cent of the total volume of reported crime.
However, the pattern of reported crime is greatly different across metropolitan areas. This graph shows that overall 2005 crime rates varied substantially across the country. You can see the highest rates tended to be in Western CMAs: Saskatoon, Regina, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Edmonton. The lowest rates were in Quebec and Ontario. This finding is similar at the provincial level as well.
Senator Cordy: I am sorry to interrupt. What do you mean? Do you mean that the crime rate is lower in Halifax than it would be in smaller communities in Nova Scotia?
John Turner, Chief, Policing Services Program, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada: I would be happy to respond to that. Generally, the pattern of higher crime rates in Western cities also applies provincially. Generally the highest crime rates have been in the Western provinces and generally the lowest are in Ontario and Quebec.
Mr. Heisz: The remainder of this talk will discuss economic conditions and economic development in CMAs. I would like to note that there are large differences in the labour market strength of CMAs, and this is true even in 2006 with the strong economy. CMAs have unemployment rates that vary widely. Of the selected CMAs, Montreal and St. John's have unemployment rates over 8 per cent while all the selected Western CMAs had employment rates under 5 per cent, so there is a great deal of difference in their labour market conditions.
I will pass the mic over to Mark Brown, who will conclude our presentation.
Mark Brown, Senior Research Economist, Micro-economic Analysis, Statistics Canada: A large number of recent reports have indicated that cities are an increasingly important driver of economic growth in Canada. We can get a picture of that by noting a few things.
First of all, incomes on average are higher in larger cities. For example, there is about a 25 per cent income gap between cities with a population of 500,000 or more and rural parts of Canada.
Because people earn more in larger cities, the economic footprint of these major urban centres is greater than their populations would suggest. Because of the strong metropolitan growth, strong population growth, the economic importance of major urban centres in Canada is growing ever larger. That has raised a lot of questions among the research community as to why it is occurring. In part, of course, it is due to high rates of immigration, particularly in places like Toronto and Vancouver. Even smaller centres are growing faster. Medium-sized cities between 100,000 and 500,000 people are growing faster than smaller cities, and smaller cities are growing faster than rural parts of Canada. It is difficult to attribute that pattern to immigration. We have to look at other factors underlying the relatively strong growth in larger places.
There are basically three characteristics of cities that reports are beginning to point to that may be helping to drive their growth. First of all, larger cities tend to have more highly educated populations. The chart on the right of this slide tries to give you that particular impression.
To give you an idea of size, large places are places with a population of 500,000 or more; medium-sized places have between 100,000 and 500,000 people; small places have between 10,000 and 100,000 people; and then there are rural places. There is a real gradient in the proportions of the populations that have post-secondary degrees. In large cities, about 20 per cent of people have degrees and this percentage declines with the size of the place all the way down to rural areas where about 12 per cent of the population have degrees.
How does that give an advantage to larger places? First of all, economic growth in the long run ultimately relies on the development of new products and production processes and new industries. This in turn depends increasingly on the scientific and technical knowledge embodied in a highly educated work force. It is this kind of worker that larger cities have in relative abundance. A second advantage of having a very highly educated population is that firms that need highly educated workers are more likely to find them. In other words, they can find them more quickly and can find the right person for the right job, and that can be very important for their long-term growth.
Education is one advantage of larger cities. A second advantage of cities that may be a bit less obvious is that they concentrate more firms in close proximity, and this can be an advantage to those firms. The chart on the right shows the average number of firms in an industry by city size. For a large city, like Toronto or Vancouver, the average firm will have about 70 other firms in the same industry doing the same type of business. That number falls to about 10 for medium-size cities and to just a handful for small cities and rural areas.
In a large place, you will have a large concentration of firms in the same industry doing the same thing. That can provide some real advantages to those firms. First, although firms in the same industry are often competitors, they also learn from each other. One firm that successfully adopts a new innovation will be followed quickly by other firms. They will try to learn from them and try to adopt that particular new way of doing business quite quickly. Because there are more firms in the same place, there are more firms doing different things and they can learn from each other. We can contrast that to a firm that is more isolated with just a few firms around them. There are fewer firms to learn from and less they can learn from those other firms. Therefore, they may fall behind the curve and they may not be able to catch up in terms of new innovations.
Second, when you have a large number of firms concentrated in one place, you also tend to get more extensive buyer-supplier networks, that is, firms set up to serve this cluster of firms. They will tailor their products to sell to those firms and that will make the downstream firms, the buying firms, more competitive. Many studies have shown that firms in a cluster will be more productive with more output per worker than firms found outside of the clusters. That is another advantage of larger cities.
Finally, and this is almost axiomatic, larger cities also tend to be more industrially diverse. These are not one- industry towns. Toronto has many industries; so does Montreal. That can provide them with some real advantages. One is that innovations developed in one industry are more likely to be adopted by others. When you have a large number of industries in one place, if one develops a new technology, quite quickly the others might find it useful and adopt it. That can lead to growth in the long run. Another advantage is that greater diversity is generally associated with more stable growth, so you may have stronger growth and that growth path will be more stable. In other words, a one-industry town will have a lot of ups and downs over time, but in a large city with many industries, if one industry goes down, another will come up. That will help to smooth the growth path over time.
The factors of education, having clusters of firms in the same place, and having an industrially diverse economy help to propel the economies of larger cities forward over time. That concludes my part of our presentation.
Mr. Picot: The next couple of slides summarize the points we made. I am not sure it is necessary to go over that.
The final slide is an outline of census releases. As I mentioned, so far we have released the population statistics from the 2006 census. Over the next year we will release other characteristics of the Canadian population, related to the topics that we raised here, the last and perhaps the most important being income and earnings data from the census, which we will release about a year from now. We plan to update the reports that I referred to earlier, the nine studies of different dimensions, some of which you heard here. We plan to update those over the coming years as these data become available.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. That is a lot of information that will be valuable to us over the course of our examination of the cities issues and challenges. I would like to ask you about the definitions of cities in a context of this committee's examination. Our terms of reference initially talk about the largest city in each province, but comparing a city like Charlottetown versus a city like Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, you find they have a lot in common but there are also many differences in the dimensions and the scope of many issues.
The Conference Board of Canada recently talked about the ten cities that are the economic drivers in the country, though they are not necessarily the 10 largest cities. In addition to census metropolitan areas, there is now entering into the discussion about cities something called the city-region.
Take for example my own city, Toronto. There is the City of Toronto. There is the GTA, the Greater Toronto Area. There is the CMA, which is different from the GTA; I am not sure how close the CMA and the GTA are. Then, in the context of the city-region, most people in my city would refer to the Golden Horseshoe, which would reach out as far as Hamilton, maybe even Kitchener and Guelph. I cannot remember exactly what the Golden Horseshoe encompasses, but it gets you into not only large urban but also small urban, smaller cities and even rural areas. You have the Niagara fruit and wine belt. There is quite a variation within that Golden Horseshoe, which the Conference Board of Canada tells us is relevant because together that is a major economic generator for the country.
Do you have any comments about the different definitions? I would also be interested to know how close the GTA and the CMA are.
Mr. Schellenberg: I think the appropriate unit of analysis will depend to some degree on the questions and the topic areas that will be addressed. If you are talking about service delivery and funding of immigrant service agencies, for example, then perhaps the municipality is an appropriate unit of analysis. If you are talking about economic growth and development, then the Golden Horseshoe makes more sense.
I would add even a third complexity to that: when we talk to the environment division within Statistics Canada, we are not talking about administrative boundaries but rather about the watershed or the ecosystem in which the city is located. It would make no sense to talk about municipal boundaries if we are talking about water quality or air quality.
I do not think there is a single right answer in terms of the unit of analysis, but key considerations are the topic being addressed and the questions being asked.
The Chairman: That is a good answer. We will deal with the cities agenda in a theme way. For example, social capacity is one theme. Environmental sustainability, infrastructure, urban governments, fiscal capacity and economic development and international competitiveness are the other main groups that come out of the reference from the Senate.
If we are talking about economic development, then I suppose we are better off looking at city-regions in the case of my part of the world, the Golden Horseshoe. With social capacity, perhaps the individual municipalities are the right unit. For environmental sustainability, as you say, the watershed or other broad definitions of areas may be appropriate. Is that what you are suggesting, that in each theme or topic area we might have a slightly different definition of city or of place?
Mr. Schellenberg: I think it would be a prudent way to approach the different substantive areas.
The Chairman: Okay, interesting.
Senator Munson: I have only one question and it may not be fair to you, but it is a general question to the committee as well. With the numbers of population growth, look at the charts that you have and the cities that surround Barrie, for example. Barrie used to be a small town. Now it is turning into a big city.
I am wondering whether will we be able to determine whether the social or health care infrastructures in places that are growing rapidly will be put into place or whether what we have there now will serve. I think that will be the crux of what we will talk about: Are we ready as a nation to facilitate health care and social care in these areas that are growing rapidly? I do not know if you as statisticians can answer such a question.
Mr. Picot: I am not sure.
Senator Munson: I am just throwing it out there because it will be a statistic. I think statistics will show that we will be in a bit of trouble in financing and providing help for areas that are growing so fast with new Canadians.
Mr. Picot: We can hopefully help by looking at utilization of health care facilities and doctor-population ratios and things like that, but I am not sure we can make a general statement about whether the facilities that will be needed are actually there currently or whether they will be in the future; that is even more difficult.
We did produce some statistics on the use of the health care system, for instance, and health outcomes which one could talk about. That is the extent of the contribution we could make to that. It is obviously a tremendously important question.
Mr. Schellenberg: I think one point is the degree of variability across CMAs in the types of demands that are placed on infrastructure and capacity. I will give you two examples. We did not touch on population aging. The numbers for population by age and sex will be coming out in July. If we go back a few years — I think I have 2004 numbers — we can talk about the aging of the Canadian population and the implications of an older population for infrastructure. In the census metropolitan area of Calgary, people age 65 or more account for about 9 per cent of the population. In St. Catharines or Victoria, they account for around 16 per cent of the population. There is tremendous variability in the numbers of older people in those areas. Similarly, we could talk about capacity of immigration settlement. In 2001, recent immigrants, defined as being here ten years or less, accounted for about 17 per cent of the populations of Vancouver and Toronto, whereas in Winnipeg they were 4 per cent. The demands placed on service delivery there has a fourfold difference as a proportion of population across certain CMAs.
Senator Nancy Ruth: I have three questions. They are all quite different. First, I want to know the implication of the destruction of the agricultural lands with these expanding metropolises from Toronto to Barrie. Second, I was interested in the charts with the earnings and the higher credentials and the earnings dropping for immigrants. To what other factors is that related? Third, in the crime statistics, what is happening in Western Canada as opposed to other provinces that causes those differences?
Mr. Picot: I am not sure that we can address your first question, to be honest.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Can you address it in terms of food supply or trade?
Mr. Heisz: Statistics Canada's environment division does collect information, I believe, on what is happening to Class A land around the CMAs and at what rate it is declining, but I cannot comment on it. I do not have that information with me right now.
The Chairman: Perhaps you could provide us with that?
Mr. Heisz: Sure. I would be happy to.
Mr. Picot: Regarding your second question, we have done quite bit of research on that. You are asking what are the other factors relating to the deterioration in economic outcomes?
Senator Nancy Ruth: We are importing more university graduates but the earnings are halved.
Mr. Picot: There are three or four factors that show up in the research. One is that over the 1980s and early 1990s in particular, the shift in source country probably had something to do with it. Traditionally, people from China and India have a more difficult time in the labour market upon entry into Canada than do Western Europeans. There was a shift towards a greater proportion coming from those countries, which affected their labour market outcomes, including earnings.
Another factor that showed up is what is referred to as returns to experience. Traditionally, Canadian-born workers with 10 to 15 years of work experience expect to be paid for that work experience and their wages will rise as they acquire experience. Traditionally that was the case for immigrants. If an immigrant came from some other country, they would be paid for that experience. That seems to have disappeared. Now when immigrants arrive in Canada, they receive almost zero benefit from that previous experience in terms of effect on their wages; as a result, their wages have fallen. Now when a person comes in with ten years of experience, they are basically starting as if they had no experience. We are not sure why that is happening but we do see it.
The third point is probably a shift in language skills. Along with a shift in source countries has come a change in the ability to function in English or French, which has almost certainly been affecting economic outcomes.
The fourth factor is a general deterioration in economic outcomes of new labour market entrants. We know that in Canada, earnings of young men in particular have been declining for about 20 years. People who are entering the labour market are not doing as well now as they did 20 years ago. That is a general decline in the entry level earnings of anyone entering the labour market and immigrants happen to be a special case of that. They are new labour market entrants in Canada like young people are. They got caught up to some extent in that general decline in economic outcomes.
I would say those four factors are what the research is focusing on to explain why earnings have fallen over the last 20 years among recent immigrants in spite of the rising educational attainment.
The Chairman: Do you have any comments on the final question about why crime is so much heavier out West?
Mr. Turner: That is not recent. That has been the case for 20 or 30 years. As long as we have been collecting crime statistics, Western Canada has had higher crime rates. As to why, I do not know if anyone is really sure. If there have been any trends over the last 20 years in Western Canada, they are probably that Alberta's crime rate has dropped lower compared to the other three Western provinces and the other three province stayed relatively the same. Over that same 20 or 30 years, we have seen the crime rates of Ontario and Quebec drop relative to the rest of Canada, while Atlantic Canada's rates have come up a bit, but the West stayed fairly constant and fairly high.
Senator Nancy Ruth: It is not necessarily related to Aboriginals or immigration or any of usual? Gangs?
Mr. Turner: There are so many factors. We did some geo-coding work within selected cities and we have found certain factors such as low-income areas and single-parent families, which have an effect on a certain areas of one city, but to extrapolate to an entire city is more difficult.
Senator Nancy Ruth: When you say something like low-income families, do you also include lack of social services, housing and so on?
Mr. Turner: They are all tied together. Those are areas that tend to have a higher proportion of those characteristics. Not to say that those families are particularly involved, but those areas tend to be higher crime areas within a city. There is also difference within a city; for instance, violent crime tends to be concentrated more in downtown areas, around bars, obviously. Property crimes tend to be spread out within a city, migrating more to the suburbs compared to downtown. There are many different factors to consider.
There is an interesting thing happening in the West now. We have talked about the population shifts in Alberta and about the fact that Alberta has seen a decrease in their crime rates for a number of years. Now, however, a lot of young single males aged 18 to 30, who are over-represented in committing crimes, are moving to Alberta, and they are starting to see an increase in crime there.
Senator Cordy: I do not usually find statistics particularly interesting, nor can I understand them, but I have this morning. That is a compliment to you. Thank you very much.
When you look at the growth of large cities, you look at issues like transportation, crime, immigration and the problems with rapid growth. You addressed them all this morning. I wonder if you have done any analysis — you mentioned it earlier with Senator Munson on health care — of transportation infrastructure. I was looking at the information you gave us: only 7 per cent of workers who live more than 20 kilometres from the city of Toronto use public transportation whereas 64 per cent of workers in the city core use it. Have you analyzed that data? Is public transit in place outside of the downtown core or is it just that people who are traveling more than 20 kilometres would prefer to have their own vehicles? You gave the example of Toronto, but I am wondering if the same things hold true in Montreal, Vancouver and the other large cities.
Mr. Heisz: We did do quite a bit of analysis on those questions. We did not look at where the bus routes were specifically. However, we have a sense that the public transit systems in all of the larger cities are relatively central-city focused. They are quite efficient at getting people into the downtown core. For example, in Toronto, of all the riders commuting on public transit, almost half are heading to the downtown core. When I say the downtown core, I mean a very small area in the central city of Toronto.
In Toronto you see a lot of job growth in the suburbs. You could take the airport as an example. Fewer than 10 per cent of the people going to work at the airport take public transit. The airport area is tremendously fast-growing in terms of employment. In contrast, over 80 per cent of the people who work in the downtown core take public transit to work. Another interesting fact is that if you are going into the downtown core of these cities, you are more likely to take public transit than you used to be.
A number of factors are at play here. Public transit is good at getting into the downtown core but a lot of job growth is in the suburbs. Suburbs are well accessed by highways. The suburbs usually have large shop floors so the employers are fairly distant from each other. It is difficult to put bus stops and routes around those things. The large shop floors come with large parking spaces so people are able to park there. It is maybe a convenience factor that would need to be overcome.
However, as cities grow and there is more pressure on infrastructure, the transit systems do appear to make gains by getting more people onto the systems that are in place. Now, if you are going downtown, you are much more likely to take the bus than you used to be.
As for what is happening in other CMAs, the example that Mr. Schellenberg gave was Toronto. Toronto is a special case because of how fast it is growing and how fast it is growing in the suburbs. A CMA like Montreal, for example, which did not grow as fast over the period we examined in that study, had a more balanced growth in its transportation uses. It had less growth in the suburbs, so it had a more balanced use of public transit around the area. That is closely tied to how much growth there is in the CMA as well.
Senator Cordy: Did you look at all at housing? I am thinking particularly of cities in Alberta. You did not mention Fort McMurray, but housing costs are just exploding there. The availability of housing in some cities is negligible. People are moving to those cities but they have nowhere to live. Maybe I am asking about Fort McMurray because I am from the East Coast.
Jane Badets, Director, Social and Aboriginal Statistics, Statistics Canada: That is one aspect that we did not get to look at in the presentation; we did not do the analysis. I understand that you are asking CMHC to appear and they did more in-depth analysis of that with census information as well as affordability and other indicators. They can provide a better picture on housing in cities.
Senator Cordy: I am curious about people who are working outside the city centre in Toronto. Are they living in the city centre and traveling 30 or 40 kilometres outside?
Mr. Heisz: What seems to be happening is first the suburbs grow and then employment grows in the suburbs and it is all happening together. We did look to see whether people tend to be commuting farther or not. There was not a sense from our study that people are commuting farther. You have more people living in the suburbs; you have more working in the suburbs.
Having said that, there are different kinds of commute routes that one can take. We call living in the suburbs and commuting to downtown the traditional commute route. Non-traditional commute routes are living downtown and commuting to the suburbs, and commuting between one suburb and another suburb. Where you see the growth in large cities is in non-traditional commute patterns. You do see some growth in people commuting from downtown to the suburbs, but the big growth is in people commuting from suburb to suburb. The difference between those types of commutes are not that great. The difference is in the mode. When you are commuting from suburb to downtown, you are likely to take public transit. Even commuting from downtown to the suburbs, you are still likely to take public transit because the routes are still there for you. It is commuting from suburb to suburb that sees very low a take-up in public transit. Given that that is where most of the growth is occurring in terms of where people work and where they live, it does suggest an area of pressure in the largest cities.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: I agree with Senator Cordy that you make statistics interesting, but the subject is interesting. That is why we are here.
I have one question that is easy to answer and perhaps one that is not so easy.
I am looking at page 15 of your presentation. I am very interested in the city of Toronto. I understand a bit of what is happening in the northwest of Toronto. There is an area on the lakeshore that has a low-income rate of more than 40 per cent. Can you tell me where that is geographically?
Senator Nancy Ruth: It is the St. Lawrence Market area, the Esplanade. Some of it is subsidized housing. It is mixed.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: But a low-income rate of more than 40 per cent is very high.
The Chairman: That is also the port area. In fact most of it, it looks to me, is port area.
Senator Nancy Ruth: There are no people living there.
The Chairman: There are no people living in the port area but I am not sure how far up into the city it goes. You may be right, Senator Nancy Ruth; it may be taking in some areas. Let us hear it from the experts.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Guess where we live.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: I thought the housing had all become very expensive down there, not all but most of it.
Senator Nancy Ruth: It has. A little townhouse sold yesterday there for $437,000.
Mr. Heisz: One of the shortcomings of census tracts is that often they encompass areas where not very many people live. You mentioned the port area because they are all together, but I think the northern boundary of that particular census tract is the Gardiner Expressway. We are talking about an area between the Gardiner Expressway and the lake.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Is that where all those condos are?
The Chairman: No, they are not that far east. There may be some in there but not many. I think that is mainly the industrial port area. Not much of a population would exist there.
Senator Nancy Ruth: There is the co-op; the women's network subsidizes down there.
The Chairman: I am not sure it is in that census tract. It is a small map.
Mr. Heisz: We did not map any census tracts that had extremely low populations. What ``extremely low'' means to anybody is up for debate.
Senator Nancy Ruth: You know where this is? This is going over to the Leslie Street Spit.
The Chairman: It includes the Leslie Street Spit. Not a soul lives on the Leslie Street Spit.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Carlaw Avenue has those tiny worker houses.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Could you clarify for us what the boundaries of that area are?
Mr. Heisz: I would able to do that in a follow-up. Is the area to the north of that Regent Park? That is a highly dense area. You see four little squares in there, and that is what that area is.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Also, I wondered if you could provide us later, if not today, with any breakout data on this 44.4 per cent of lone-parent families with the low income in the CMAs. What is the number there? That is a percentage. That really struck me as something that I do focus on and I wondered if we could have any elaboration subsequently on that piece of data.
Mr. Heisz: We can answer that in a follow-up, yes.
Mr. Picot: If I could elaborate on that. There is hope regarding the lone parents that you are referring to in low income. The low-income rate is very high among lone parents but it actually has been falling. Over the last 10 or 15 years, the low-income rate among lone-parent families has fallen a substantial amount. It used to be in the 60 per cent range and now it is in the 40 per cent range.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Could that be part of the information you will provide to elaborate on that piece of data?
The Chairman: With respect to immigration and the big cities, I think you said 73 per cent in the top 3 cities, Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. There have been efforts to try to get people to move into other parts of the country, into rural areas or smaller urban areas. That would sort of indicate that those efforts do not really succeed. Could you comment on people starting in smaller urban or rural areas but then ending up in the big cities? Do you capture them as well or do you just plot where they land in Canada in the first place?
Mr. Schellenberg: We do both. In a study we did a couple of years ago, we looked at the concentrations within the cities at that time, but with the 2001 census data, which we will be able to replicate for 2006, there are questions about where a person lived one year ago and five years ago. We find that, while there is residential mobility within CMAs, most people who end up in Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver stay there. Any subsequent inter-CMA mobility is generally into Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver.
Regarding the success of relocation programs or particular efforts to direct people, such as provincial nominees, I do not have the figures off the top of my head for the extent to which people who are in those smaller cities stay there over the long-term or subsequently relocate to the larger centres.
We did a longitudinal survey of immigrants to Canada and we asked why they settled in the cities where they settled. The number one response was the presence of family and friends in those areas, which suggests that putting people into areas where they do not have family and friends could produce challenges.
The Chairman: Then the more of them in the big three cities, the more they attract.
Senator Keon: I must say that compared to the former mayor of Toronto I know very little about this subject, but I find it interesting. Mr. Picot, you made a very interesting comment if I heard it right. You said that the actual income of the labour force was declining.
Mr. Picot: Of young people, young males in particular.
Senator Keon: Yet here we have this very significant shift of people from the country to the cities.
Mr. Picot: Right.
Senator Keon: We are aware of the spread between the rich and the poor. I know there are some pockets of the rich whose incomes have been growing almost exponentially, the major executives and so forth. Do we have an overall decline in incomes in Canada? I cannot believe it.
Mr. Picot: No, no, we do not have an overall decline. What we have is different groups of the population with different trends. The overall average family income has been fairly constant. It was fairly constant over the 1980s and 1990s and has risen some in the 2000s. That is what is happening in the average. If you look at particular populations, you find different trends.
As you pointed out, the incomes of the people at the top of the income distribution have been rising quite rapidly. The incomes of the people at the bottom of the income distribution, the poorer-paid people and poorer families, have been stable and in some cases declining. Young people's incomes, particularly young males through the 1980s and 1990s, fell quite substantially. The incomes of older workers actually rose. There was a period when the incomes of people over age 35 were rising and those of people under age 35 were falling. Some people have been gaining. Some people have been losing.
Over the last 20 or 30 years, the mean value of family income was fairly constant for a long time but it has risen post- 2000. That is the situation we are in now.
Senator Keon: Do you have the numbers for the proportion of those groups?
Mr. Picot: Yes, but I do not know them off hand.
Senator Keon: Could you supply them for us?
Mr. Picot: We have done a number of studies on these earnings trends and we could put them together and send them to you.
Senator Keon: I think that would be interesting. Thank you very much.
Senator Nancy Ruth: On the issue of immigrants and where they choose to live in Canada, have you had a chance to measure whether there is any increase in earnings for immigrants who take the risk and go elsewhere to earn, rather than those who go to the metropolitan centres? Is there an economic incentive existing now to encourage that?
Mr. Picot: That is a great question. There are two ways of thinking about that. First, a good research project would be to track those people as they move from Toronto to a smaller centre to see what happens to their earnings. We have not done that. That would be a great research project.
We did ask about the decline in earnings, especially at entry level. When people come into Canada, when immigrants come in, we have seen their earnings declining through the years, through successive groups entering.
Was that happening in all the cities, the big cities and the small cities? We were thinking that maybe it is happening in the big cities like Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, because that is where they are all going and it may result in a decline in earnings. However, in a city like Winnipeg or Halifax, we may not see that because there are fewer immigrants and they have a better chance. That is not what we found. We found that earnings fell in all of the eight largest cities and earnings were falling everywhere among immigrants. There does not seem to be a huge economic advantage to being in a smaller city with fewer immigrants entering.
Senator Nancy Ruth: I do not know whether you want to answer this question but I want to ask it: Should I relate that primarily to racism rather than skill?
Mr. Picot: We cannot deal with the issue of discrimination because we do not have any way of measuring it. We simply cannot measure discrimination.
The Chairman: I think we can draw our conclusions about it in any event, and we can get some anecdotal information that will help amplify the statistics.
Senator Nancy Ruth: I am from Toronto and so I look to see who is in the financial sectors or the government sectors, the municipality, and those kinds of places. Who is in banking? It is still pretty white-bread. Is there any measurement of power structures and changes in there in terms of race? I ride on the subway and I see everybody. Then I go downtown to a law firm and I see white people, primarily.
Mr. Picot: I guess another way of posing that question is whether we see in different occupations other changes taking place?
Senator Nancy Ruth: Are there shifts happening in large cities?
Mr. Picot: I do not know the answer to that. I do not know if anybody does. We could theoretically look at that but I have not seen that evidence.
The Chairman: I have the same observations.
Senator Nancy Ruth: It is like political parties.
The Chairman: I think we are complete then. It has been a terrifically informative and interesting session. Thank you very much for coming here and for giving us this information. We may call you back at some other time. We are into a couple of years here. That is one of the benefits of the Senate; we can do long-term studies. You will be releasing other reports and we may need some information on specific theme areas.
Committee members, we will pause for about a minute while our guests leave and then we will go in camera and talk about the draft work plan.
The committee continued in camera.