Area population hits 250,000

October 9, 2009

The population of Saskatoon's metropolitan area has officially reached the quarter-million mark, Statistics Canada says.

The 250,000 total appeared for the first time in a Statistics Canada report Thursday that looked at the population of Canada's census metropolitan areas at the end of 2008.

The symbolic threshold is important "because it's documenting the continued growth of the area," said Bill Holden, manager of the city's research and information resource centre.

At 10,000 more people than the 2006 census, metropolitan Saskatoon ranks fourth in the country in terms of growth, jumping more than four per cent over two years.

Saskatoon's population has been bolstered by immigrants and people moving in from other provinces, bucking a decades-long trend where growth came almost entirely from small towns and reserves in the province.

Only retirement haven Kelowna (7.8 per cent), Calgary (5.2 per cent) and Edmonton (4.7 per cent) outpaced Saskatoon's population boom between 2006 and 2008.

Regina and area jumped 3.3 per cent in the two-year period to 206,700, ranking ninth in the country in growth.

While the 250,000 mark is largely symbolic, population growth of this magnitude means the city might be ready for a boom in the culture sector, said Pierre Filion, an urban planning professor at the University of Waterloo who specializes in mid-size cities.

"It means the potential for more semi-professional sports teams," Filion said. "If you have a symphony, the more population you have, the better it will be. Those are things that grow and improve with the size of a city.

"Development happens now by multiplication rather than expansion," Filion said. "You don't get bigger malls, you get more malls; not bigger department stores, more department stores."

What makes Saskatoon unique within Canada is that it's one of the few cities of its size that doesn't exist in the orbit of a megacity, Filion said.

"You're self-sustaining," he said. "You need to have everything that bigger cities have on a small scale."

Saskatoon's metropolitan area includes all of the towns that surround the city, including Warman, Martensville, Aberdeen, Dundurn, Asquith, Dalmeny, Delisle and others.

In the last decade, the surrounding towns and cities have begun to outpace the city's growth, Holden said, reversing a longtime trend that saw Saskatoon as one of the only cities in the country where the city proper was outgrowing its surrounding communities.

The city now calculates its population based on the annual Statistics Canada figure for the metropolitan area, assuming Saskatoon itself makes up roughly 86 per cent of the total.

If growth continues at two per cent per year, the population within city limits, estimated at 218,000, will hit the 250,000 mark around 2016, Holden said.

David Hutton - The Star Phoenix

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