The Greater Toronto Area is the 8th largest metropolitan area in North America. In addition to the City of Toronto, it includes the Regional Municipalities of York, Halton, Peel and Durham. The term GTA only came into usage in the mid-1990s after it was used in a widely discussed report on municipal governance restructuring in the region.

General information

The Greater Toronto Area is one of North America's fastest-growing urban areas. As an economic area, the GTA consists of the City of Toronto and four regional municipalities in a total area of 7,125 km². This covers an area roughly equivalent to the surface area Lake Simcoe, on its northern reaches. Total population and land area of the City of Toronto and the regional municipalities of Durham, Halton, Peel and York which form the Greater Toronto Area (2). Population and land area figures for Toronto and the regional municipalities come from the 2006 Canadian census: 3. Vast parts of the GTA remain farmland and forests, including protected sections of the Oak Ridges Moraine, Rouge Park and the Niagara Escarpment. All of these areas are protected by the Greenbelt. Nevertheless, low-density suburban developments continue to be built, some on or near ecologically sensitive and protected areas. The government of Ontario has recently attempted to address this issue through the "Places to Grow" proposal which emphasizes higher-density growth in existing urban centres over the next 25 years.

The work force is made up of approximately 2.9 million people, more than 100,000 companies, and a CA$360 billion gross domestic product.Fact: date=February 2007. If it were a country, the GTA's GDP would rank approximately 20th in the world. The GTA is Canada's business and manufacturing capital by a large margin. The GTA is home to a number of post-secondary educational institutions, including 4 universities and 7 colleges.

The following regional municipalities are included in describing the Greater Toronto Area:

• Regional Municipality of Durham
• Regional Municipality of Halton
• Regional Municipality of Peel
• Regional Municipality of York

The population of this area is 5,555,912 as of 2006. The City of Toronto is now a single-tier municipality, but before 1998 it had a similar "regional" structure under the name Metropolitan Toronto, and comprised of Toronto (old), York, North York, East York, Etobicoke and Scarborough. Originally, Toronto was called the City of Toronto, and the others were boroughs. Eventually, York and North York were called "cities", though still part of the Toronto Municipal Government. Eventually, the idea of boroughs and cities was discarded and there is now one City of Toronto, with its northern border Steeles Avenue, and its southern border Lake Ontario.