On June 16, 2023, Statistics Canada's population clock ticked past 40 million people. Canada was growing faster than at any time since the 1950s, adding more than a million people in a single year. Then the story flipped. From July 2025 to July 2026 Canada added only about 189 000 people, a growth rate of about 0.5 percent, the slowest percentage growth since 1915–1916, during the First World War. What changed so quickly? Births and deaths barely moved. The answer is migration, and to see it you need the tools geographers use to measure a population. That is what this lesson is about.
Counting people: the census and population estimates
A census is an official count of every person in a country, along with information about them: age, sex and gender, language, where they were born, education, income, housing and more. Canada holds a census every five years (2016, 2021, 2026). Everyone fills in a short questionnaire, and a sample of households (about one in four) gets a longer one with more detailed questions. Between censuses, Statistics Canada publishes population estimates every three months, built from records of births, deaths, immigrants, emigrants and people moving between provinces. The census gives the detailed snapshot; the estimates keep it up to date. Statistics Canada's free online Census Profile lets you look up any city, town, First Nation reserve or census division and compare its population, growth, age structure, languages and housing with Ontario and with Canada: one of the best ways to practise the skills in this unit.
Why populations change: the demographic equation
A population can change in only four ways. People are born into it, they die, they arrive from somewhere else (immigrants) or they leave (emigrants). Geographers group these into two parts. Natural increase is births minus deaths. Net migration is immigrants minus emigrants. Add the two together and you have the total change. For a province or a city, people moving in from and out to the rest of Canada (internal migration) count as migration too.
A city of 50 000 and a country of 40 million cannot be compared by raw numbers of births. So geographers turn counts into rates. The birth rate is the number of births per 1000 people in a year; the death rate is deaths per 1000. The rate of natural increase is the birth rate minus the death rate. A rate per 1000 becomes a percentage when you divide by 10, so a natural increase of 5 per 1000 is 0.5 percent. The population growth rate includes migration as well, and is usually given as a percentage of the starting population.
| Measure | What it tells you | Canada (year, Statistics Canada) |
|---|---|---|
| Births | Babies born in a year | About 351 500 (2023) and about 365 700 (2024) |
| Deaths | People who died in a year | About 326 600 (2023) |
| Natural increase | Births minus deaths | About 24 900 (2023): tiny for a country of about 40 million; preliminary estimates showed slightly more deaths than births from January to March 2026 |
| Total fertility rate | Average number of children per woman over her lifetime | 1.25 (2024), a record low; about 2.1 is needed to replace the population without migration |
| Permanent immigrants | New permanent residents in a year | About 368 200 (July 2025 to July 2026), down for the fourth year in a row |
| Non-permanent residents | International students, temporary workers, asylum claimants and their families | About 2.78 million on July 1, 2026 (6.7% of the population), down about 155 000 in one year |
| Population growth | Total change as a percentage | About +0.5% (July 2025 to July 2026) |
The boom and the slowdown
| Period | Growth | What drove it |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 to 2021 (census) | +5.2% over five years | Almost twice the growth rate of every other G7 country; nearly four-fifths of the increase came from new arrivals (immigrants and temporary residents) |
| 2020 | About +0.4% | COVID-19 border closures sharply cut immigration; the lowest growth rate since 1916 |
| July 2023 to July 2024 | About +2.8% (revised) | Record numbers of permanent immigrants plus a fast rise in international students and temporary workers |
| July 2024 to July 2025 | About +1.1% | Federal limits on study permits (from January 2024) and lower immigration targets begin to bite |
| July 2025 to July 2026 | About +0.5% | Number of non-permanent residents falls sharply as permits expire; fewer permanent immigrants |
The slowdown was a policy choice. In 2024 the federal government began capping the number of new study permits, tightened some temporary work programs, lowered its targets for new permanent residents, and set a goal of bringing temporary residents down to less than 5 percent of the population. You will look at these decisions, and at the debate about them, in the Immigration lesson. For now, notice the geographic lesson: a population can change direction within two or three years when migration changes, while births and deaths change slowly.
Finally, population density is the number of people per square kilometre of land. It tells you how crowded a place is on average. In the 2021 census, Canada had about 37.0 million people on about 8.79 million km² of land, a density of only about 4.2 people per km², one of the lowest in the world. The City of Toronto had about 2.79 million people on about 631 km², about 4400 people per km², roughly a thousand times denser. An average hides a lot: most of Canada is nearly empty, while most Canadians live in a narrow, crowded band in the south (Lesson 4).