demographics
04. demographics
Canada’s metro areas continue to attract residents at a pace exceeding that of their parent provinces.
THE HAVES, THE HAVE NOTS, & THE URBAN HOT SPOTS OF POPULATION GROWTH
Over the past 12 months through November, Canada’s population (to be specific, its population aged 15-plus) has grown by 1.6%. At first blush this might seem to be rather modest growth; however, when placed in an historical context we can see that it is the fastest rate of year-over-year population growth the country has experienced in the past two decades. The vast majority of this growth continues to be driven by immigration, and this is also true for the country’s metropolitan areas, which disproportionately attract immigrants versus their less urban peers, as well as movers between provinces—most of whommove in search of education and/or employment opportunities. Not surprising, then, that the fastest population growth rates that are being
registered across the country are in places like the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA), at 2.7%, Vancouver (2.1%), Edmonton (2.3%), and Calgary (2.4%). Additionally, robust population growth is being realized in some of Canada’s smaller CMAs, including Abbotsford-Mission (2.8%), Saskatoon (2.4%), and Halifax (2.4%). The east-west pattern of metro area growth has yielded above-the-Canadian-average provincial growth rates in BC (1.8%), Alberta (1.7%), and Ontario (2.0%)...and PEI (2.7%). With the exception of the latter, the robust rates of population growth seen in the west and in Canada’s economic heartland reinforce those provinces’ importance in driving Canada’s economy, with much of the growth serving to buttress provincial and regional labour forces that are facing headwinds from an aging population.
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