Commuters drive past a suburb near Mavis Road on Highway 401 in Mississauga. Nearly all of Canada's population growth over the past five years occurred in the suburbs, according to a new analysis of the 2011 Census data by an urbanist who says government policies are driving people out of the city — and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Photograph by: Brent Foster, National Post Files , National Post

TORONTO — Nearly all of Canada's population growth over the past five years occurred in the suburbs, according to a new analysis of the 2011 Census data by an urbanist who says government policies are driving people out of the city — and that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

While the downtowns of Canada's six largest metropolitan areas made modest gains, urban cores have been "dwarfed by the scale of suburban population increases," which made up 93 per cent of the nation's growth, Wendell Cox, principal of Demographia, a St. Louis, Mo., demographics and urban policy firm, wrote in an analysis this week posted on the website NewGeography.com.

This continued growth comes despite what Cox calls "anti-suburban policies" that outlaw development on large swaths of land, creating scarcity and increasing housing prices.

He believes governments should build more highways instead of trying to get the public riding mass transit. More highways, he argues, will cut down on traffic congestion, which leads to air pollution and less productive cities as workers spend more time on the road.

Instead of trying to keep Canadians in their cities, Cox said governments need to realize this creep past the city limits and into the suburbs isn't going to change any time soon.

"All things being equal, more people prefer to live in lower-density surroundings with a little patch of ground than they prefer to live in the condominiums and the high rise," he said. "In the long run, people's preferences are really going to drive how things work regardless of the policy instruments that are used to try to change their behaviour."

Cox, who used federal electoral districts and the 2011 Census data released last week to compare growth in city centres and their outer regions, found that in some cases, central municipalities account for only one-fifth of the growth of their metropolitan areas — Montreal being the slowest growing major metropolitan area at a rate of 5.9 per cent. It saw the area outside the core make up 95 per cent of the population increase there.

Major metropolitan areas Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa-Gatineau and Vancouver also saw significant growth outside their core, Cox's analysis showed, with non-core areas making up for 97 per cent of growth in Calgary, 98 per cent in Edmonton, 94 per cent in Ottawa-Gatineau and 87 per cent in Vancouver.

The Census data revealed that Toronto was surpassed for the very first time by the ballooning population of its neighbouring "905" region.

The numbers don't surprise Glenn Miller, vice-president of education and research at the Canadian Urban Institute, a not-for-profit organization that has been tracking the outward expansion of Canadian cities. It has watched businesses move out of cities' downtown financial cores and into the suburbs; a report it released last April showed only 20 per cent of the Toronto region's office jobs are in Toronto's core, compared to 63 per cent three decades ago.

Most of these companies have moved out to the so-called "905" region of Ontario to places such as Mississauga, Brampton and Vaughan, suggesting a need for expanded transit systems so those who have moved out to the suburbs don't need to drive to work.