Canada’s population drops as country caps immigration

Canada’s population fell by 76,068 between July and October – a contraction mainly due to limits on immigration, the federal statistics agency said.

This decrease is mainly due to a drop in the number of non-permanent residents, Statistics Canada said Wednesday, and comes after Ottawa set a goal of limiting temporary residents to 5% of the 41.6 million inhabitants by 2027.

That’s a dramatic change from 2022, when the population grew by more than a million people for the first time, fueled in part by efforts to recruit immigrants to ease labor shortages.

“We needed to bring our level of immigration to a more sustainable level,” Canadian Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne told reporters.

Champagne, speaking from Berlin during a visit to Europe, said the government’s goal is to “take back control of our immigration system and find a better balance between our reception capacity and the number of people who want to come to the country.”

The population decline is “the largest and second-largest quarterly decline on record since the 1940s,” Robert Kavcic, senior economist at the Bank of Montreal, said in an analysis.

“A significant demographic adjustment is underway and it remains one of the most important economic events in Canada,” he added.

Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made efforts to attract more immigrants to the country, including planning to welcome half a million immigrants per year by 2025.

In 2023, the vast majority of Canada’s population growth – about 97 per cent – ​​was due to immigration, according to federal data.

But the rise in new arrivals has been blamed for putting pressure on the cost of housing, pressure on social services and youth unemployment rates.

Trudeau last year announced a sharp reduction in the number of immigrants Canada allows into the country in an effort to curb population growth, saying his government “didn’t strike the right balance” when it increased immigration after the pandemic to address labor shortages.

Prime Minister Mark Carney continued on this path, with Ottawa seeking to significantly reduce its target for new temporary residents, from 673,650 to 385,000 next year, and to 370,000 in 2027 and 2028.

According to preliminary figures from Statistics Canada released Wednesday, the country’s population decreased by 0.2% in the third quarter of 2025 – the first decline since the Covid pandemic in 2020.

This decline is explained by a drop in the number of non-permanent residents – mainly international students as well as temporary foreign workers – in the third quarter of 2025, the largest observed since comparable records began in 1971.

As of October, there were more than 2.8 million non-permanent residents in Canada, or about 6.8% of the total population.

The provinces of Ontario and British Columbia experienced the largest population declines. Only Alberta and the territory of Nunavut saw their population grow.