People walk on University Ave. in downtown Toronto on Nov 8, 2021.Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail
Statistics Canada says the national population almost hit 37 million last year as it grew at the fastest rate among G7 nations.
The agency says Canada’s population was just over 36.9 million on census day last year, growing by 5.2 per cent between 2016 and 2021.
The five-year growth rate was double that of any peer country in the G7, and Statistics Canada says most of the growth happened prior to the onset of the pandemic in 2020.
Statistics Canada says the main reason for the slowdown in growth was border restrictions that, while meant to slow the spread of COVID-19, also slowed the pace of newcomers arriving in Canada.
The agency says population growth was at a record high before the pandemic, and then slowed to its lowest rate in a century in 2020.
Statistics Canada says there were about 1.8 million more people calling the country home in 2021 compared with 2016, with four in every five being immigrants.
Immigration has been key to driving population growth as the birth rate has declined, but the agency notes that rate in 2021 hit its lowest level of record.
Statistics Canada says some of that slowdown might be pandemic-induced. The agency points to one of its studies done late last year that suggested adults under 50 wanted to have fewer children than previously planned.
At this point, the agency says, Canada’s isn’t headed to a situation where deaths outnumber births like in Italy and Japan, at least within the next 50 years.
The details released this morning are the first set of findings from last year’s census taken against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Today’s release also notes that the Maritimes grew faster than the Prairies for the first time since the 1940s, largely on the back of immigration. Newfoundland and Labrador was the lone province to see a decline.
The country’s large urban centres witnessed a growth in their populations between 2016 and 2021, and the number of cities with more than 100,000 people grew to 41 from 35. Rural areas, too, grew, albeit at a far slower pace than their metropolitan cousins.
Statistics Canada plans to add more flourishes to the paint-by-numbers exercise as the year rolls on to reveal more information about how the country has aged, changes among Indigenous populations, and working during the pandemic.
The pandemic is expected to have an effect on census results, although experts suggest the country may have to wait a few years to learn whether COVID-19 caused a permanent or temporary shift in the portrait of the population.
Downtowns
When Mark Garner looks around downtown Toronto all he sees is growth.
At Yonge and Gerrard streets, the executive director of the Downtown Yonge Business Improvement Area watches the lobby of the 80-storey Aura condos – the country’s tallest – filling up with deliveries. On the east side of Yonge Street by Ryerson University, he sees a residential building in the works that just bumped up its size from 80 to 90 storeys.
Steps away, there are proposals to turn the Elephant and Castle restaurant into an 80-storey tower and replace the former Chelsea Hotel with four residential towers.
Keeping up with the boom is Garner’s obsession because the new buildings will affect everything from traffic to business performance, transit needs and demand for mental health services in the bustling neighbourhood, whose population crept above 276,000 last year.
That figure was revealed by Statistics Canada on Wednesday, when it released the first of seven tranches of data from the census last year. For the first time, it contained information on the country’s downtowns.
The data showed more than 1.2 million people, or 3.5 per cent of Canadians, lived in the downtown portion of one of the country’s 41 large urban centres in the spring of 2021.
These downtowns saw their populations grow by 10.9 per cent between 2016 and 2021, a much faster rate than the 4.6 per cent growth they experienced during the previous census period, which covered 2011 to 2016.
Those numbers include a slowdown in growth experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was more than a year old during last May’s census.
The health crisis has challenged cities. Many downtown regions became ghost towns in the earliest days of the pandemic as businesses temporarily closed and companies sent staff home to work. Immigration halted and some residents sought housing outside of the city, where space was more plentiful and real estate prices lower.
In Toronto, the population grew by just 0.4 per cent between July 2020 and June 2021, lower than the overall 3.2 per cent annual growth seen between 2016 and 2021.
The pandemic’s effects were even more noticeable in Montreal and Vancouver.
Slowly but surely, people have since returned to downtowns. Even so, retail and restaurant sales, foot traffic and the general atmosphere still remain a shell of what they once were.
That means predicting what the downtowns of the future will look like is more tricky.
“Where are all these people coming from and where are they going?” said Garner. “It’s a big challenge.”
Despite the pandemic, Environics Analytics chief demographer Doug Norris believes most downtowns are on the path to keep booming.
Downtown Vancouver’s growth will be a bit less pronounced because it’s already built up, but he expects “hefty growth” in Toronto and Calgary and a sizable amount in “second-tier” downtowns Ottawa and Winnipeg.
The census showed the population of Vancouver’s downtown totalled about 122,000, Montreal’s was roughly 109,000 and Ottawa reported 67,000.
“In the big cities like Montreal and Vancouver, even if there is some shift in working, it is going to be very vibrant,” Norris said.
“There are all kinds of reasons to go downtown.”
But Garner has doubts that downtowns can handle more growth with their current levels of infrastructure.
Before the pandemic, he said, 42 million people walked on the BIA’s stretch of Yonge Street every year and 55 million visited the Eaton Centre mall.
About 175,000 Torontonians live within a 10-minute walk of Yonge-Dundas Square and between shoppers, workers, students and theatregoers, the neighbourhood’s daytime population would swell to well over 600,000.
The strains were showing as condo after condo cropped up.
“You’re building towers where there’s currently no parking,” he said, citing a project under construction at Yonge and Gerrard Streets.
“You’ve got a condo, which now has to have delivery trucks, cars, so all of a sudden you put 350 parking spaces and cars in an area that were never there.”
Real estate broker Tirajeh Mazaheri has seen Vancouver’s downtown strained because of space.
“There’s very limited land and it’s not like the suburbs, where there’s infinite amounts of land to be able to develop on,” she said.
“If you want to be within downtown, you have no choice but to choose one of the downtown condo options that you have.”
While Mazaheri noticed people fled Vancouver’s downtown for larger properties during the pandemic, the allure of the area hasn’t dissipated and she predicts it will see a resurgence as workers return to offices.
But the properties up for grabs will come with a steep cost and lots of competition that’s already materialized.
The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver reported the benchmark price for homes sold in Metro Vancouver last year was more than $1.2 million, up 17.3 per cent from December 2020.
“I have certainly noticed as of January of this year, more activity was in downtown,” Mazaheri said.
“Yesterday, I just sold a condo that was around the $750,000 price range with multiple offers and it sold in five days … so we will definitely be seeing a huge shift in demand for properties in downtown Vancouver. It’s only a matter of time.”
Small urban centres
One in 10 Canadians are calling smaller urban centres their home, according to the 2021 Census from Statistics Canada.
Last year, 3.8 million people, or 10.1 per cent of Canadians, lived in smaller urban areas ranging from about 10,000 to 100,000 people, otherwise known as census agglomerations.
Squamish, B.C., grew the fastest at a rate of 21.8 per cent, or 24,232 more people, between 2016 and 2021.
Meanwhile, four of the 10 fastest growing smaller urban centres were in Ontario – Wasaga Beach, Tillsonburg, Collingwood and Woodstock.
Several are known as tourist destinations or resort cities. While they are close to nature, they are not among the most remote communities and are generally less than a one-hour drive from a large urban centre.
Statistics Canada says the combination of outdoor facilities and location may have attracted people from larger metropolitan areas, such as young retirees or those able to work from home.
Rural areas
Statistics Canada says the share of Canadians living in rural areas has declined for the ninth census in a row, dropping from 18.7 per cent in 2016 to 17.8 per cent in 2021.
The agency says it counted more than 6.6 million people living in rural parts of the country in May 2021.
It says the population of rural Canada ticked up 0.4 per cent compared to five years earlier, but the rate of growth trailed behind the 6.3 per cent rise in urban areas.
Doug Norris, chief demographer at Environics Analytics, says rural-to-urban migration, aging populations and lower rates of immigration have decimated many rural communities in the far reaches of Saskatchewan, eastern Quebec and Atlantic Canada over the last two decades.
Statistics Canada says the lag between rural and urban growth might have been starker had it not been for the pandemic’s demographic disruptions.
The agency says the immigration slowdown brought on by COVID-19 border restrictions had a more pronounced impact on population growth in large urban centres, while the rise of remote work saw urbanites flock to some rural areas.
Alberta
Statistics Canada says Alberta’s growth has lagged slightly behind the rest of Canada over the last few years.
The national number-cruncher says the province grew 4.8 per cent between 2016 and 2021, bringing its population to just over 4.2 million people.
That’s below the national growth average of 5.2 per cent.
Only two of the 25 fastest-growing Canadian communities were in Alberta, while nine of the municipalities with the highest population losses were in Wild Rose Country.
In the last census, Alberta’s growth rate topped 11 per cent.
Still, the province’s current growth rate was enough to push the provincial capital of Edmonton past the one-million mark for the first time.
Quebec
Data from the 2021 census shows that Quebec’s share of the Canadian population declined for the 11th consecutive census.
Quebec was home to 23 per cent of Canadians in 2021, down from 23.2 per cent in 2016, as its population grew by 4.1 per cent between 2016 and 2021. While that was ahead of the previous census, when Quebec grew by 3.3 per cent, it remained below the national growth rate of 5.2 per cent.
The Montreal region saw its population grow 4.6 per cent between 2016 and 2021, up from 4.2 per cent in the previous census.
Statistics Canada said that growth was driven by immigration from 2016 to 2019, but that the province’s largest urban area saw its population decline by 0.6 per cent between July 1, 2020, to July 1, 2021, as it lost people to other Quebec regions.
The federal statistics agency said downtown Montreal had the highest growth rate in the metropolitan region, 24.2 per cent. It’s the second highest downtown growth rate in the country. Suburbs more than 30 minutes from downtown Montreal grew by seven per cent, a faster pace than the other parts of the city and suburbs closer to downtown.
Atlantic
After living in Toronto for 25 years, Beth Hitchcock was ready for a change, having grown weary of big city life.
Over the years, the veteran magazine editor had developed an appreciation for the easygoing lifestyle in Nova Scotia, where she had spent time visiting friends and attending a graduate-level course at the University of King’s College in Halifax.
“Whenever I would go back to Toronto, I would be invariably sitting in the back of a cab on the Gardiner (Expressway) in traffic, seeing the city approach – and I would feel sort of depressed,” Hitchcock said. “I didn’t feel that deep sigh of, ‘Oh, I’m home.”’
In January 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was making its unwelcome debut, she decided to move to the East Coast, an interprovincial shift that has grown increasingly popular in the past five years, according to new census figures released Wednesday.
“Nova Scotia sells itself,” she said from her recently renovated home in Dartmouth, N.S., noting the relatively reasonable housing prices and, of course, the lure of the ocean. “I craved quiet, I craved ease Everyone here can find a place of solitude by the water.”
Statistics Canada says that in the past five years, the three Maritime provinces have largely succeeded in reversing a decades-long decline in population, thanks in part to a steady influx of Canadians from other provinces – particularly Ontario and Alberta.
Patrick Brannon, senior researcher at the independent Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, said the numbers illustrate a reversal for a region once famous for routinely losing too many of its young people to other provinces.
“We’re now seeing a lot of people, especially in the second half of 2020 and the first half of 2021, looking to get out of the big cities and go to smaller locations for more space and cheaper housing costs,” Brannon said. “The pandemic accelerated some of those trends”
By contrast, the population of Newfoundland and Labrador declined by 1.8 per cent to 510,550 between 2016 and 2021, mainly because of slumping oil prices and the winding down of some megaprojects in recent years, Brannon said. Aside from the Northwest Territories, Newfoundland and Labrador was the only province to post a population decline.
But it’s clear that growth in the Maritimes remained red hot.
For the first time since the 1940s, the Maritimes grew at a faster pace than the Prairie provinces.
“People are cashing out their nest eggs and heading to (the Maritimes), where they can buy a house for a quarter of the price and have a better quality of life,” Brannon said. “A lot of people saw (the pandemic) as an opportunity to get out of the big city and head to a place they felt more safe.”
In the past five years, the population of Prince Edward Island grew by eight per cent – its highest population growth rate on record – to reach 154,331 in 2021. At that rate, P.E.I. was the fastest-growing province in Canada, though Yukon held top spot overall with a growth rate of 12.1 per cent.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia grew at their fastest pace since the early 1970s. Nova Scotia’s population grew by five per cent to reach 969,383 residents, and New Brunswick posted an increase of 3.8 per cent to reach 775,610 people.
The new census figures also show the region has succeeded in attracting a larger number of immigrants from other countries. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island welcomed a record number of immigrants between 2016 and 2021, the vast majority arriving prior to the pandemic.
In Halifax, Atlantic Canada’s largest city, Mayor Mike Savage doesn’t need census figures to tell him the Maritimes have become a people magnet.
“We’re seeing people coming here who are younger,” Savage said in an interview, noting that in the past two years, almost all of Halifax’s new residents arrived from other parts of Canada. “There’s been a tremendous change in who’s coming here.”
In a relatively short time, Halifax has become a trendy technology hub that is struggling to keep pace with the demand for housing, the mayor said.
“That’s not where we were 10 years ago,” he said. “We have become very attractive for international companies. When I became mayor (in 2012), there wasn’t much of that My own kids want to live here now. We’ve seen a remarkable turnaround.”
As for Hitchcock, who now works as a freelance writer, part-time designer and journalism instructor, her move to the Maritimes has inspired three of her Toronto friends to do the same. More recently, another Toronto-based couple she knows – both in their 30s – have also decided to head east in March.
“Strangers reach out to me and ask me about (the move) on social media,” said Hitchcock, former editor-in-chief of Canadian House and Home Magazine. “(And) it’s not just people approaching middle age or people coming here to retire It’s a massive shift in how people want to live.”
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