Canada’s population grew at the slowest pace in more than a century as Covid-related restrictions curbed immigration. The nation’s population rose by just 0.4% in 2020 to 38,048,738, Statistics Canada reported Thursday in Ottawa. Canada welcomed 184,624 immigrants in 2020, down by almost half from 2019. Over the past five years, immigration has accounted for more than three quarters of Canada’s total population growth, but that figure dropped to 58% in 2020.
«Safely resuming population flows is critical to Canada’s recovery from Covid-19,» Marc Desormeaux, an economist at Bank of Nova Scotia in Toronto, said by email. «I don’t think we’ll know until at least the summer what the full impact of the government’s recent push to dramatically increase permanent residents, and to what extent these will actually reflect an increase in the number of people as opposed to just a change of status,» Andrew Agopsowicz, an economist at Royal Bank of Canada, said by email. Population growth in Canada was also impacted by the deadly nature of the coronavirus. The natural increase in population — the difference between births and deaths — also fell to 62,834, the smallest increase since at least 1922.
Source: Shelly Hagan | Bloomberg
No comments:
Post a Comment