Canada Therapist to Population Ratio

I did a quick little study because I had a question. I have noticed (not just for me but for others), that finding a counselling/therapist related job is difficult in Manitoba, but have seen several people (like I did) dart off to other provinces to find employment in counselling/therapy.

I originally went to the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Assoication website to search for workers per province. However, their search engine, while useful for consumers, did not help me. TherapistLocator.com, run by the American Association of Marriage & Family Therapists, showed to be useful for my little study.

I did quick counts of how many Therapists (including affiliate, and student since they too could be employed in counselling) there are per Province in Canada.

I then went to the latest Statistics Canada population count. I then came up with these numbers.

Province	Therapists	Population	Ratio
Yukon	4	33,700	8,425
Manitoba	100	1,222,000	12,220
Northwest Territories	2	43,400	21,700
Saskatchewan	40	1,030,100	25,753
Alberta	140	3,687,700	26,341
British Columbia	150	4,455,200	29,701
Nova Scotia	20	938,200	46,910
Ontario	210	13,069,200	62,234
Quebec	110	7,828,900	71,172
Newfoundland and Labrador	4	508,900	127,225
New Brunswick	1	749,500	749,500
Nunavut	0	32,200	0
Prince Edward Island	0	141,000	0

The National Average is 1 Therapist for every 43,201 people.

So, we can see that Manitoba is, in a sense, flooded with therapists. It is probably to the credit of the University of Winnipeg program (1 of 2 in Canada recognized by AAMFT) for Marriage and Family Therapy that there is this balloon. However, not all MFT's have a Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy.

Counselling is almost top heavy in the West. With all four provinces having a better therapist to population ratio than the national average. However, all of the Eastern provinces are worse than the national average.

So, for future counsellors, your best markets are Eastern Canada, well, anything besides Manitoba, where one therapist has access to roughly 12,000 people (that's a small market!). If 10,000 people did see you in one year, and your cost was $50 per session, that's $50,000. However, somewhere like Saskatchewan (the next province on the list), there could be 20,000 to see you in one year. That's $100,000.

So it looks like I might be on the move.