demographics
BC AND THE EVER-BLOWING WESTERLY
BC’s net interprovincial migration flow over the past 12 months has no parallel in the country, with Canadians being drawn to the province’s strong labour market.
Within Canada, domestic migration flows ebb and, well, flow largely based on relative economic performance: if the economy in one part of the country is performing well and providing opportunities for those engaged in the labour market, then it often follows that people from other parts of the country are willing to move to capitalize on those opportunities. This is certainly the case for British Columbia, especially when it comes to the swapping of migrants with its next door neighbour, Alberta: for the past 40-odd years, net migration to each respective province has moved in a distinctly counter-cyclical way to one another. More recently, however, BC has been attracting people from everywhere in Canada—not just its nearest neighbour. For example, while almost half of the 9,013 net domestic migrants who came to BC in Q1 2021 were from Alberta (4,383 of them), an additional 2,730 were from Ontario,
904 were fromManitoba, and 864 were from Saskatchewan. The western-centric migration flows we saw in Q1 were also not unique over the past year, as BC has attracted more than 30,000 net interprovincial migrants over the past four quarters. How dramatically large is that number? The second-highest net interprovincial migrant count over the past year was in Nova Scotia, though that province only attracted 6,000 net migrants (one-fifth of BC’s tally). On a per-capita basis, Alberta continues to feed BC’s labour market, with its ratio of 998 net migrants to BC per 1 million population representing the largest such ratio in the country. This cannot continue in perpetuity, but while it lasts, BC’s labour market—and the provincial economy—will continue to greatly benefit.
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