Everyone knows about the population disparity, but do they know why?
Last week, I looked at Whitehorse’s role as the “moose in the room” when talking about the Yukon population. Almost 80 per cent of Yukoners live in what Statistics Canada charmingly calls the “Whitehorse Census Agglomeration.”
But if Whitehorse was in Alaska, it would only be the fifth largest borough. The Whitehorse agglomeration is significantly smaller than Anchorage, Matanuska-Susitna Borough, Fairbanks North Star Borough and Kenai Peninsula Borough.
The Whitehorse blob is, however, now bigger than the Juneau borough (although Whitehorsians visiting Alaska’s capital never fail to point out that we still don’t have a Fred Meyer or Costco).
Alaska’s biggest city, Anchorage, has almost 300,000 residents but is proportionately less dominant than Whitehorse. It has only 39 per cent of Alaska’s 737,000 people. Even if you include the sprawling neighbouring suburbs of Matanuska-Susitna, population 113,920, you only get to 55 per cent of Alaska’s population.
For the rest of this article: https://www.yukon-news.com/columns/yukonomist-why-alaska-has-4-times-more-people-than-the-yukon-nwt-nunavut-and-greenland-combined-7373337