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Commuting Patterns and Places of Work of Canadians, 2006 Census: National, provincial and territorial portraits
Place of work status
Working in a province or territory other than the usual place of residence
Relatively few Canadian workers had a place of work in a province or territory other than the one in which they usually lived.
Nationally, only 147,300 or 1.0% of all workers lived in one province and worked in another in 2006. Among those, more than one-third (36.4% or 53,600) were commuting from the Quebec side of the Ottawa - Gatineau CMA toward the Ontario side. Another 17,000 were commuting in the opposite direction.
As a consequence of Alberta's booming economy, more people worked in this province while having their usual place of residence in another.
In 2006, 1.1% of workers whose usual place of residence was in Newfoundland and Labrador actually worked in Alberta. This was considerably higher than the proportion of 0.3% in 2001.1
About 1.7% of workers whose usual place of residence was in Saskatchewan worked in Alberta in 2006, up from 1.2% five years earlier.
Note:
- It is important to be cautious when interpreting these data. The census asks respondents to enter on the form all persons who usually live at this address, including (among others) spouses living elsewhere because of their work or studies, but who periodically return. Some people who worked in another province between January 1, 2005 and the week including May 15, 2006 may also have worked in the province of their place of residence (and reported that they did not have a usual place of work). It is also possible that people whose spouses temporarily left the usual place of residence to work in another province may not have considered them as being part of the usual members of the household at the time of the census, despite the instructions provided in the documents.
