Adults ineligible to vote

This map shows the proportion of the adult population that is ineligible to vote, that the share of adults that are not Canadian citizens. In Metro Vancouver 16% of the adult population is ineligible to vote, with 20% of the adult population in Burnaby ineligible to vote, followed by Richmond at 19%, Vancouver at 18%, and Surry at 17%. Metro Toronto paints a similar picture, with 14.8% of the adult population ineligible to vote, lead by the City of Toronto and Brampton at 17%, followed by Markham, Richmond Hill and Mississauga around 15%. The distribution is not uniform within the cities, and for example varies greatly between wards in Toronto.  There have been discussions in Vancouver and Toronto to allow permanent residents to vote in municipal elections, with Vancouver already having passed a motion to ask the province for permission to enable this. The map only shows proportions for the population in private households, so this omits adults in collective households for which we don't have citizenship data in the standard census release. Generally, the proportion of adults in collective households is small and unlikely to sway the results by much. Not all non-citizen adults in private households are permanent residents, refer to the map of non-permanent residents and that of permanent residents for details. For example, in the City of Toronto 3.5% of the population in private households are non-permanent residents, compared to 11.2% permanent residents in Toronto. Granting permanent residents the right to vote in municipal election would significantly raise the number of voters. The map only counts adult citizens in private households, and implicitly assumes that the adult population in collective households are not citizens. It thus slightly over-estimates the proportion of adults not eligible to vote. The population in collective households is overall quite low, 1.5% in Metro Vancouver and 1.1% in Metro Toronto. The numbers might change a bit depending the makeup of these people.

Author: CensusMapper Team

Dataset: CA16