The County of Simcoe has launched an interactive Population Growth Dashboard, a new online tool that gives residents, community groups, municipalities and service providers access to long-term population forecasts across the region.
The dashboard, announced from Midhurst on Friday, allows users to explore anticipated population changes across the County's 16 member municipalities as well as the separated cities of Barrie and Orillia, according to a County of Simcoe news release.
The tool was built by the County's Community Partnerships, Policy and Business Intelligence team together with its Planning Department. It pulls together two streams of information: municipal growth forecasts developed through the County's Official Plan Amendment No. 7, and independent population projections from Statistics Canada.
Users can work with interactive maps, tables and visualizations. The County says the tool lets people compare expected growth between municipalities, look at different population scenarios, and examine trends by age and gender.
For local governments and organizations, the practical uses are broad. The County says the dashboard can support community needs assessments, grant applications, housing and infrastructure planning, and decisions about how services are delivered over the long term.
The release notes the dashboard also explains where its numbers come from and how they are calculated. That documentation is intended to help users understand the differences between municipal forecasts, demographic projections and supplementary estimates — data sources that can point in somewhat different directions.
The release does not spell out specific population figures or growth targets, and the dashboard's projections were not included in the announcement.
The new tool lives on the County's open data platform at open.simcoe.ca, which is designed to make localized data freely available to residents, businesses and municipalities.
The platform already hosts several other interactive resources, including a 2021 Census Tool, a Rental Data Aggregator and an Affordable Housing Indicators Dashboard, along with a range of other datasets.
The dashboard's launch comes as Simcoe County communities continue to grow rapidly, with planners, school boards, health providers and transit agencies all relying on population projections to time investments in roads, housing, schools and community services.
Residents, businesses and community organizations can access the Population Growth Dashboard, along with the County's other data tools, through open.simcoe.ca.
