Actually, Charmion; Edmund is out watching rugger.

I grew up in Carleton County, Ontario, now almost entirely subsumed by the City of Ottawa, which for about 25 years was the "Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton" comprising several cities (including Ottawa), towns and villages and about a dozen townships, all in Carleton County. I still have the hard "r" of the Carleton County accent (think Belfast with a Canadian vocabulary) to prove it.

In eastern Canada, counties matter a lot if you are involved in anything legal or you live in the country. The land registries and court system are based on the system of townships and counties set up by the British in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Generally, the more rural your residence, the more aware you are of county identification because if you live on a farm or in a hamlet or village, your local government will be a township, headed by a reeve and council, and the township is a division of a county.

This sort-of rule applies to southern Ontario, southern Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia; variations are found in more recently settled parts of the country.