Brandon’s census agglomeration shrinks
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/02/2022 (1556 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
When Statistics Canada released the first pieces of data from last year’s census earlier this week, it showed the city’s population finally grew above 50,000 people, but it also showed a part of the community that shrank.
In 2016, Brandon’s census agglomeration was comprised of the City of Brandon, the RM of Whitehead, the RM of Elton, the RM of Cornwallis and the Municipality of Oakland-Wawanesa.
An area that consists of one or more neighbouring municipalities around a core community is considered by Statistics Canada to be a census metropolitan area if it has a total population of at least 100,000 of which 50,000 live in the core, and a census agglomeration for the same situation but with a core population of 10,000 and a total population below 100,000.
The map for Brandon’s census agglomeration from the 2021 census shows that Cornwallis and Oakland-Wawanesa are no longer considered to be a part of it.
Though those communities haven’t become farther away from the Wheat City, their removal has to do with their interconnectedness with Brandon.
According to Peter Murphy, a Statistics Canada spokesperson, the communities that make up a census agglomeration are determined by their proximity and integration to the central core.
That integration is determined by how many people in a neighbouring jurisdiction have the core listed as their place of work.
The threshold for how many people in a community must list the core as their place of work, Murphy said, is 50 per cent. In the RM of Cornwallis, that number fell to 48 per cent, and so it is no longer considered integrated enough to be part of Brandon’s census agglomeration.
That explains the removal of Cornwallis, but Oakland-Wawanesa was removed for another reason.
“We try not to create … geographic areas that are in parts where there are holes in the middle of them,” Murphy said.
Since the Municipality of Oakland-Wawanesa doesn’t directly connect to Brandon and doesn’t connect to another part of its census agglomeration anymore, it too was dropped.
Going back to 2016, the population for Brandon’s census agglomeration was listed as 58,003. In 2021, it was listed as 54,268, but it was also listed as a population increase of 4.8 per cent.
That’s because in the new census, it is directly comparing the population of the census agglomeration as it is now defined in 2021 and 2016’s censuses and not the population of the agglomeration’s 2021 borders to the population of the agglomeration’s 2016 borders.
» cslark@brandonsun.com
» Twitter: @ColinSlark