Statistics Canada has just released its data on the income of families and individuals in sub-provincial areas for 2019. There are two aspects to any comparison of census metropolitan areas in Canada - the level of income and the growth in that income. The first figure below plots median after tax income of census families and persons not in census families by CMA for 2019 and the results show that higher incomes are a feature of western cities and also smaller centres. Calgary and Edmonton are in first place followed by the Ontario part of Ottawa-Gatineau but Saskatoon, Guelph, and Regina are also up there with median incomes above $60,000. Thunder Bay and Sudbury fare quite well also and are at the top of of the list at $57,510 and $54,780 respectively. Canada's major metropolitan centres - Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal - do not fare as well coming in the bottom third of this list. The five lowest median incomes are mainly in Quebec with the addition of St. Catharines-Niagara in Ontario. In many respects this is not that big of a surprise. Smaller cities especially in resource based regions tend to have higher incomes. The big cities have a lot of very high income people but also a lot of low incomes bringing down the average.
What is more interesting is where the growth has been over the last five years. The next figure presents the percentage growth in median after-tax income of census families and persons not in census families by CMA between 2014 and 2019. Vancouver and Montreal saw the largest growth at 6.8 and 6.4 percent respectively. Indeed, cities in Quebec and BC dominate the top rungs in terms of median income growth with an Ontario city - Toronto - coming in 9th place. Sudbury comes in the middle of the pack at 1.4 percent and Thunder Bay is in the bottom third with its median income growing barely one percent over the course of five years. Cities in the west - hard hit by the resource sector downturn - see negative income growth along with St. John's in Newfoundland and Labrador which is at the bottom at -4.9 percent. However, the high tech Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo area also saw negative income growth during this five year period.
British Columbia and Quebec have seen the best growth over the last five years with cities in western Canada experiencing the worst growth and everyone else somewhere in between. The broader GTA from Oshawa to Niagara Falls and is not doing as well as Quebec or British Columbia and of course these numbers are all from before the pandemic.