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The Greater Toronto Area, commonly referred to as the GTA, includes Canada's most populous city, Toronto, and the regional municipalities of Durham, Halton, Peel, and York. In total, the region contains 25 urban, suburban, and rural municipalities. The Greater Toronto Area begins in Burlington in Halton Region to the west, and extends along Lake Ontario past downtown Toronto eastward to Clarington in Durham Region.
According to the 2021 census, the Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) of Toronto has a total population of 6.202 million residents, making it Canada's most populous metropolitan area, and the 7th-largest in North America. However, the Greater Toronto Area, which is an economic area defined by the Government of Ontario, includes communities that are not included in the CMA, as defined by Statistics Canada. Extrapolating the data for all 25 communities in the Greater Toronto Area from the 2021 Census, the total population for the economic region included 6,711,985 people.
The Greater Toronto Area is a part of several larger areas in Southern Ontario. The area is also combined with the city of Hamilton to form a conurbation known as the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). The GTHA combined with Niagara Region form the core of the Golden Horseshoe.
Etymology
The term "Greater Toronto" was first used in writing as early as the 1900s although at the time, the term referred only to the old city of Toronto and to its immediate townships and villages, which became Metropolitan Toronto in 1954 and became the current city of Toronto in 1998. The use of the term involving the four surrounding regional municipalities came into formal use in the mid-1980s, when it was used in a widely discussed report on municipal governance restructuring in the region and was later made official as a provincial planning area. However, it did not come into everyday usage until the mid-to-late 1990s.
In 2006, the term began to be supplanted in the field of spatial planning as provincial policy increasingly began to refer to either the "Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area" (GTHA)