(OTTAWA) Canada’s population nearly reached 37 million last year, growing at the fastest rate among the G7 countries, according to Statistics Canada.
Posted at 12:44 p.m.
The agency says Canada’s population was just over 36.9 million on Census Day last year, with total growth of 5.2% between 2016 and 2021.
The five-year growth rate was double that of any comparable G7 country, and Statistics Canada says most of the growth occurred before the pandemic hit in 2020.
In 2019, the annual growth rate had reached 1.6%, a record “of several years, even decades”, explained Laurent Martel, head of the census demographic data analysis program, at a virtual press conference on Wednesday. To give an idea of what this represents, “with a rate of 2%, a population doubles in 35 years”.
But in 2020, that rate has shrunk to 0.4%. “In fact, you have to go back to the First World War, a hundred years ago, to find a population growth rate that was as low as that recorded in 2020”, underlined the researcher.
Immigration on hold
“Natural growth, the difference between births and deaths, only played a minor role in this period, accounting for only 15% of the increase,” Martel said. The rest is due to immigration, both permanent and temporary.
According to Statistics Canada, the main reason for the slower growth has been border restrictions which, while intended to slow the spread of COVID-19, have also slowed the pace of new arrivals to Canada.
The body says there were about 1.8 million more people living in the country in 2021 than in 2016. Of the newcomers, four out of five were immigrants.
During this time, the birth rate declined. According to Statistics Canada, part of this slowdown may have been induced by the pandemic. The agency points to one of its studies from late last year that suggested adults under 50 wanted to have fewer children than they had initially planned.
At this time, according to the agency, Canada is not heading towards a situation where deaths outnumber births like in Italy and Japan, at least in the next 50 years.
Regional variations
The provinces and territories that saw their population grow faster than the country as a whole were the Yukon (12.1%), Prince Edward Island (8%), British Columbia (7.6 %) and Ontario (5.8%).
Regions with lower growth were Manitoba (5%), Nova Scotia (5%), Alberta (4.8%), Quebec (4.1%), New Brunswick ( 3.8%), Saskatchewan (3.1%) and Nunavut (2.5%).
The Northwest Territories (-1.7%) and Newfoundland and Labrador (-1.8%) even saw their populations decline.
This article was produced with the financial support of the Facebook and The Canadian Press News Fellowships.