Canada’s population hits 41 million

In just over half a year, Canada has added over a million people to its population.

That’s according to a new estimate from Statistics Canada, which now puts Canada’s population at 41 million people — a record that comes nine months after the country hit 40 million people.

And Canada’s population is growing faster than it has in nearly seven decades. A population estimate from StatsCan released Wednesday showed Canada’s population grew by 3.2 per cent in 2023, the highest single-year growth since 1957.

In the fourth quarter of 2023 — Oct. 1 to Dec. 31 — Canada’s population grew by about 240,000 people, the largest fourth-quarter growth since 1956.

The new peak stems largely from temporary immigration, StatsCan said, with over 800,000 non-permanent residents moving to Canada in 2023. Without temporary immigration, Canada’s population growth last year would have been only 1.2 per cent.

Meanwhile, only 2.4 per cent of the 1.2 million residents added in 2023 came from births. StatsCan estimates around 2.6 million nonpermanent residents were living in Canada at the start of this year.

Canada surpassed 40 million people in July, at which point it was “by far the fastest-growing among G7 countries,” Patrick Charbonneau, chief of StatCan’s Centre for Demography, told the Star last summer. Canada hit the mark faster than expected, with a 2013 forecast expecting 38.7 million residents in 10 years’ time.

While population growth stagnated in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada has now seen eight consecutive quarters — two years worth — of non-permanent resident increases.

“Since 1995, the majority of (Canada’s) population growth is coming from immigration,” Charbonneau said. “This is due to the fact that the population is aging — so we’re recording more deaths and we’re also seeing less births than before.”

Alongside international immigration, a record number of Canadians moved to Alberta in 2023 — and a large amount moved away from Ontario.

StatsCan says Alberta added 55,107 people from other provinces, the largest single-year gain of any province since the data first became available in 1972. It continues a trend that began in 2022, when Alberta ended a six-year slide of people leaving the province for elsewhere in the country.

Meanwhile, Ontario saw over 36,000 people move away to other provinces — the most of any province or territory in the country. It’s only the fourth time since 1972 a province has seen 35,000 or more of its residents move to another province — but the second time in as many years for Ontario, with over 38,000 people moving away in 2022.

More Canadians moved to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island than left. British Columbia lost residents to other provinces for the first time since 2012.

Canada’s population is growing faster than it has in nearly 70 years, as a StatsCan report shows it grew by 3.2 per cent in 2023, the highest single-year growth since 1957