Administrative county (Canada)

An administrative county (French: comté administratif), usually simply known as a county (comté), or less commonly as a county proper (comté propre) when distinguished from a ceremonial county, is a type of upper-tier municipality within the 13 provinces of Canada; the other type of upper-tier municipality is the regional municipality, also known as a regional district.

Like any upper-tier municipality, counties consist of several lower-tier municipalities, which are responsible for many local government services, with some other services provided by the county government or regional municipality. Regional municipalities, which are much more common to populated urban areas, tend to provide less localised services than counties, the latter of which are more common to suburban and/or rural areas and thus contain unincorporated communities which rely entirely on the county for public services beneath the provincial level, unlike the lower-tier municipalities in the county which provide much of their own services. Commonly, a county will have several lower-tier municipalities and unincorporated communities, while a regional municipality will consist entirely of incorporated areas (of lower-tier municipalities).

As county boundaries have changed over time, in addition to mergers or more often divisions of counties into two or more entities as well as the creation of regional municipalities, ceremonial counties were created as an attempt at a cultural/historical preservative. For example, the Canadian province of British Columbia's most populous region, the Lower Mainland, constitutes a single ceremonial county (and until 1965 constituted a single administrative county as well), but today consists of five separate regional municipalities, each with a number of lower-tier municipalities (mostly cities). Similarly, the independent municipality of Toronto (Canada's largest city and a unitary municipality independent of any county or regional municipality) as well as the neighbouring York Regional Municipality is coterminous with the ceremonial York County.