Canada had almost zero population growth in first quarter of 2025 with big drop in international students
Canada had almost no population growth in the first quarter of 2025, adding just 20,107 more people, a decline driven mainly by having fewer international students and more natural deaths than births.
As of April 1, Canada had 41,548,787 people, marking the smallest quarterly growth since the third quarter of 2020, when the population dropped by 1,232 people in the wake of border restrictions to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Statistics Canada.
Ontario saw its biggest quarterly drop in decades.
It's also the sixth quarter in a row where the country's population growth has slowed since the Liberal government started introducing
measures to reduce the levels of both temporary and permanent immigration to Canada
amid the housing and affordability crisis that led to a
growing public sentiment against immigration
.
'Even with the reductions starting in 2024,
international migration
accounted for all of the population growth in the first quarter of 2025,' the national statistics agency said in its latest population estimates, released on Wednesday.
It said the natural population actually contracted by 5,628 between January and March, meaning there were more deaths than births in Canada over the period.
'This is consistent with an aging population, a decreasing fertility rate and the higher numbers of deaths that typically occur during the winter months,' the report noted. 'Natural increase has been negative in every first quarter since 2022.'
Population shrank slightly in five provinces: Newfoundland and Labrador (-115); Quebec (-1,013); Ontario (-5,664); British Columbia (-2,357); and Yukon (-15) in the first three months of 2025. These represented the largest quarterly population losses for both Ontario and B.C. since comparable records began in 1951.
In contrast, Alberta led the pack with a growth of 20,562 residents in this quarter.
One of Prime Minister Mark Carney's government priorities is to return Canada's 'overall immigration rates to sustainable levels' by capping
the total number of temporary workers and international students to less than five per cent of the population by the end of 2027.
The latest population estimates show there were
2,959,825 temporary residents in Canada as of April 1, accounting for 7.1 per cent of the total population. This was down from a peak of 7.4 per cent on Oct. 1, 2024.
Since Jan. 1, the number of non-permanent residents has dropped by 61,111, which included
5
3,669 fewer study permit holders.
Most of the decline in international students came in Ontario (
3
0,160) and B.C. (
1
1,742), the provinces with the highest numbers of study permit holders.
However, the number of temporary foreign workers remained high, at 1,453,481, falling in the first quarter by just 5,114 people.
The growth of asylum claimants and protected persons has not slowed and instead, increased for the 13th consecutive quarter, reaching a record high of 470,029 (+12,744) on April 1.
Earlier in June,
Carney's government tabled an omnibus bill, the Strong Borders Act
,
part of it meant
to restrict access to asylum as Canada struggles with the ballooning 284,715 claims in the system
.
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