Population Patterns in the United States and Canada

The United States and Canada are large countries with very uneven population patterns. Most Canadians live in a narrow band within a few hundred kilometres of the US border, where the climate is milder and farmland and transport links are best, especially in the Quebec City–Windsor corridor along the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes. Canada's vast north is thinly settled, and in 1999 the territory of Nunavut was created, with a majority Inuit population.

In the United States, population has shifted steadily west and south over two centuries. The Census Bureau's 'mean centre of population' was in Maryland in 1790, crossed the Mississippi River in 1980 and lay in Missouri by 2020. Since the mid-twentieth century, the Sun Belt states of the South and West have grown fastest, helped by air conditioning, job growth and retirement migration, while some older industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest lost population.