According to Stats Canada, Brampton is Canada’s ninth largest city. But we might really be Canada’s seventh or eighth largest city eclipsing both Winnipeg Manitoba and Vancouver BC. Still we’ll never know for sure, because we don’t have an accurate population number! The 2016 census reported that Brampton’s population was 593,638. Between 2011 and 2016, we grew 13.3 per cent. The 2016 numbers are obviously out of date. The Region of Peel reports that Brampton grows nearly 3 per cent a year.

According to the Region of Peel, Brampton’s population in 2018 was 656,900. If you add 3 per cent in 2019, Brampton’s population would be 676,607 a gain of about 19,000 people. Some city politicians estimate there are about 8000 illegal secondary units with occupants that may not have been counted. If you conservatively estimate the number of illegal secondary units, times a factor of 1.5 people per unit, you end up with 12,000 more folks for a total of 688,607.

So, if everyone was counted, we would vault to 8th position in Canada surpassing Vancouver and we’d be hot on the heels of Winnipeg by 2020. Brampton is the third largest city in the GTA and the fourth largest city in Ontario. All of which doesn’t mean a hill of beans unless we get our population figures straight.

But why does it matter how big we are? The city of Brampton is rightly doing their best to attract home office business and manufacturing operations. While we have about 74,800 businesses employing over 25,000 employees now, we need to attract companies that hire larger number of local people and we need larger companies beyond the 307 industries that hire over 100 people. More companies reduce the residential/industrial ratio which sits at a very high 80/20 down to a balance at 60/40. Larger companies help complete the employment cycle in Brampton avoiding travelling distances for work. So, population figures do matter!

We are the only major city in Canada that doesn’t have a university. While Algoma University is providing some relief and Ryerson University is partnering for cyber studies, only Sheridan College provides a full program of technical studies, some of which lead to a degree. It is a crying shame that the Ford government closed the door to completing the educational cycle in Brampton by refusing to partner with the city and Ryerson University. Population figures do matter!

An accurate population number would surely change our transfer payments from the provincial government and would cause the feds to ante up more gas tax rebate as well. If we had an accurate population count, our political representation would change and we would have better luck at proper regional representation. Population figures do matter!

Believe it or not, Brampton is bigger than Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland /Labrador, and just as big as New Brunswick. When we are done, we will be bigger than each of the Maritime provinces except Nova Scotia. So, what do we do? We’re not in charge of the voters list, since we don’t have voter registration and we don’t tabulate the number of people who live here every five years like Stats Can. We need a more formal way to collect population numbers.

If we leave it to the census, we don’t get a year by year accounting of our population numbers. Both, Stats Canada and the Ministry of Finance Ontario know the growth pattern here and the need for that to be recognized annually to arrive at proper population numbers. Both need to get on with that and city council needs to force the issue of correct population counts with those two entities. Brampton, Canada’s 9th largest city, needs to know accurate and correct population numbers because numbers do matter!

Terry Miller is a long time Brampton resident and former Peel Region and Brampton City councillor. The Scene column appears weekly in the Guardian