Vancouver LGBT Community Chat

While LGBT people live in both large and small communities throughout Canada, the largest and most prominent LGBT communities are located in major metropolitan cities such as Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa. LGBT-oriented neighbourhoods, or gay villages, such as Toronto's Church and Wellesley, Vancouver's Davie Village and Montreal's Village gai have emerged as hubs of LGBT culture and tourism.

As the Census of Canada does not ask all respondents to identify their sexual orientation, there is no exact overall count of how many Canadians identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. However, because same-sex marriage has been legal in Canada since the passage of the Civil Marriage Act in 2005, census figures are published for same-sex couples.[1] The Canada 2006 Census recorded approximately 7,500 same-sex marriages nationwide, while the Canada 2011 Census listed 21,000.[1] However, the 2011 data only included couples living in major cities -- some additional data on same-sex couples in smaller communities was withheld from publication after Statistics Canada determined that due to data tabulation errors as many as 4,500 pairs of platonic roommates may have been incorrectly counted as additional same-sex couples.[2] This error primarily seemed to affect smaller natural resource communities, such as development sites in the Alberta oil sands, where some people reported themselves as both married and living with a person of the same sex, but may in fact have been migrant workers who weren't married to the same person with whom they were sharing accommodation on the census date.[2]