Population

Canada vs US population growth: the most extreme demographic about-face in any G7 country, currently in progress on both sides of the border

Canada's population grew by 3.2% in 2023 — the fastest rate since 1957 — and added 1.27 million people, the largest absolute annual gain in Canadian history. The United States grew by about 1.0% in 2024, the fastest rate since 2001. Both surges were driven almost entirely by international migration, and both are now sharply reversing. Statistics Canada estimates the Canadian population at 41,472,081 on January 1, 2026 — down from 41,575,585 three months earlier, the second consecutive quarterly decline and the first back-to-back drop on record outside the pandemic. The US Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 release has growth slowing to 0.5% for the year ending July 2025, with net international migration down 53.8%. This is the first time in modern history that both North American economies are simultaneously contracting their immigration intake. This page is about how the surge happened, how the reversal happened, and what each country is now learning about absorption capacity.

A note on the data above: the chart shows roughly 42.4 million for Canada in 2026, but that figure is from a projection series and not the StatCan quarterly estimate. The actual estimate as of January 1, 2026 is 41.47 million and falling. Treat the recent Canadian readings as projections rather than realized values until the Q1 2026 release in mid-June 2026.

For the indicator definition see the Population Growth indicator page. This page is about the comparison between two countries that surged together, then reversed together.

The numbers

From the Statistics Canada quarterly demographic estimates and the US Census Bureau vintage estimates:

• Canada, January 1, 2024: about 40.8 million.
• Canada, April 1, 2024: 41.01 million — first time crossing 41 million.
• Canada, October 1, 2024: about 41.46 million, with NPRs peaking at 3,149,131 (7.6% of population).
• Canada, January 1, 2025: 41,528,680 (+0.2% q/q — slowest since Q4 2020).
• Canada, July 1, 2025: 41,651,653 (+0.1% q/q — slowest Q2 since 2020).
• Canada, October 1, 2025: 41,575,585 (−76,068 — first quarterly decline outside the pandemic).
• Canada, January 1, 2026: 41,472,081 (−103,504 — second consecutive quarterly decline).
• United States, July 1, 2024: 340.1 million.
• United States, July 1, 2025: about 341.9 million — growth slowed to +0.5% (slowest since early COVID).
• 2023 Canadian growth: +3.2% (highest since 1957); 2024 growth +1.8%.
• 2024 US growth: +1.0% (fastest since 2001).
• 2025 NIM (US): 1.3 million, down from 2.7 million the prior year.

The key reframing: in 2023 Canada was growing 3 times as fast as the US in percentage terms. By Q4 2025 Canada is shrinking in absolute terms while the US has slowed to a 0.5% pace. Both countries went from accelerating immigration intake to active deceleration in less than two years.

The 2022–2024 surge: why Canada's number got so big

Canada's three-year acceleration over 2022–2024 added roughly 3 million people, or +8.0% — the most extreme three-year peacetime acceleration in any G7 country since the 1950s. The drivers, all confirmed across StatCan, IRCC, Bank of Canada, and University of Waterloo Mikal Skuterud's published work:

1. Pandemic backlog clearance: IRCC processing capacity caught up after 2021–22, delivering record permanent resident admissions of 437,000 (2022), 471,000 (2023), and 483,591 (2024).
2. Designated Learning Institution boom: Ontario private career colleges issued large volumes of Letters of Acceptance through 2022–23. Study permit holders roughly tripled between 2018 and 2023.
3. Post-Graduation Work Permit pipeline: students became NPR workers, then often attempted to transition to PR.
4. TFW expansion in 2022: in response to post-pandemic labour shortages, Ottawa raised the low-wage cap from 10% to 20% of an employer's workforce in many sectors and lengthened LMIA validity periods.
5. International Mobility Program: open and closed work permits that don't require LMIAs grew faster than the LMIA-based TFW stream.
6. CUAET (Ukraine): more than 200,000 Ukrainians admitted under the special measure.

By October 2024, non-permanent residents — students, temporary workers, refugee claimants, work permit holders — had reached 3.15 million people, or 7.6% of Canada's total population. That share had been around 4% in 2018 and around 2% in 2010. The temporary-worker channel had outgrown the permanent-resident channel by more than 2-to-1.

The October 24, 2024 reset: Marc Miller's about-face

The political and policy turning point in Canada was October 24, 2024, when Immigration Minister Marc Miller tabled the 2025–2027 Immigration Levels Plan. The headline was a 21% cut in PR targets — from 500,000 to 395,000 for 2025, then 380,000 (2026) and 365,000 (2027). The historic shift was the introduction of first-ever targets for temporary residents, with the goal of capping NPRs at less than 5% of the population by end-2027 (from the 7.6% peak). The Provincial Nominee Program was cut in half, from 110,000 to 55,000 for 2025. The international student cap was tightened further, with 2024 study permit approvals having already fallen 52% year-over-year — a much steeper drop than the originally announced 35% target.

Miller's justification, from his speaking notes, was explicit: Canada had not built the housing, healthcare capacity, or labour-market absorption to handle the temporary-resident surge, and the system needed a reset. The plan was unusual in that it conceded the previous trajectory had been a mistake — a rare political move in either country's immigration history.

The Carney government held the line, with one twist

When the Carney government took office in March 2025 and Lena Diab replaced Miller as Immigration Minister, the question was whether the Liberals would relax the cuts or hold them. They held them. The 2026–2028 Immigration Levels Plan, released in November 2025 with Federal Budget 2025, locked PR admissions at 380,000 across all three years (slightly above Miller's declining 380→365 path). New temporary resident arrivals were cut from the 2025 target of 673,650 to 385,000 in 2026 — a 43% cut — with international student new arrivals roughly halved from the prior year (155,000 in 2026, then 150,000).

The most important Diab framing change: rather than expanding intake, the government would "give priority for permanent residence to temporary residents already living and settled in Canada." A measure of how committed the government is to the 5% NPR cap: the Parliamentary Budget Officer's February 26, 2026 report "Demographic Implications of the 2026-2028 Immigration Levels Plan" confirms the NPR share will fall from 7.6% (Oct 2024 peak) to just under 5% by end-2027 under the plan, requiring a net reduction of more than a million NPRs from peak.

The US side: Trump enforcement was the parallel reset

The US trajectory through 2025 was the parallel story. Pew Research's August 2025 release found the US immigrant population fell from 53.3 million in January 2025 to 51.9 million by June 2025 — a decline of 1.4 million in five months, the first decline in the foreign-born population since the 1960s. The Migration Policy Institute estimates the Trump administration is on track to deport about 500,000 people in FY2025 — well below its 1 million annual goal but about 25% above the 271,000 ICE deportations in FY2024. The Department of Homeland Security claims 605,000 deportations and 1.9 million "self-deportations" since January 20, 2025; treat these as political claims (PIIE's Jason Furman has noted that part of the Pew foreign-born decline is a survey-response artifact, with undocumented immigrants increasingly avoiding government surveys).

The Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 release in January 2026 confirmed the magnitude. Net international migration was 1.3 million for the year ending July 2025, down from 2.7 million the year before — a 53.8% decline. The Congressional Budget Office's July 2025 long-run projection now puts US population at 364 million in 2055, 2.2% lower than its prior projection, with the downward revision attributed to Trump immigration policy and aging.

The Tombe denominator argument

Trevor Tombe of the University of Calgary is the most-cited economist on the per-capita GDP angle. His framing: "It's the denominator that explains Canada's seemingly poor performance" by per-capita GDP. Real GDP growth in Canada averaged about 2% per year over the past decade — second-best in the G7 behind only the US. But population grew about 3% in 2023 and 2024, almost entirely from immigration, two-thirds of which was non-permanent. Q2 2024: real GDP per capita declined 0.1% q/q; down 2.2% YoY; down 3.6% from the 2022 level. Tombe estimates that if Canada had matched US per-capita GDP growth over the prior two years, GDP would be about 8.5% larger — roughly $6,200 more income per Canadian per year.

The counter-perspective comes from Jim Stanford at the Centre for Future Work and an April 2025 Policy Options piece, "The misleading use of per capita GDP." Their argument: per-capita GDP is a flawed yardstick because it conflates productivity, employment composition, hours worked, and demographics. The numerator side of the Canadian story — productivity growth has been trending down since the 1980s — is also weak, and population growth alone is not the entire story. Both sides are correct: the denominator surged, the numerator was already weak. See the GDP per capita compare page for the per-capita gap.

Labour-market absorption: the killer paper is Skuterud's

Mikal Skuterud at the University of Waterloo (founder of the Canadian Labour Economics Forum) is the leading skeptic of Canada's high-immigration model. His 2023 working paper "Canada's Missing Workers: Temporary Residents Working in Canada" documents a discrepancy between StatCan LFS estimates (about 391,600 increase in employed TRs from 2006 to December 2022) and IRCC administrative data (1,585,664 TRs employed at that time) — a gap exceeding 1 million workers. Most of those workers are not visible in standard labour-market statistics. Skuterud's framing: "Labour shortages aren't a problem to be solved by bringing in additional workers, but an opportunity for businesses to make themselves more efficient."

Pierre Fortin at UQAM published a CLEF Working Paper in 2024, "The Immigration Paradox," using Beveridge curve analysis to argue that "the increase in demand generated by immigration has more than likely outpaced the additional supply, potentially making economy-wide labour shortages more widespread rather than alleviating them." The Bank of Canada's own May 2025 Staff Discussion Paper 2025-8 — "The Shift in Canadian Immigration Composition and its Effect on Wages" — found that the average nominal wage gap between temporary and Canadian-born workers more than doubled from −9.5% to −22.6% between 2015 and 2024. C.D. Howe's Parisa Mahboubi reports that 26.7% of recent immigrants with a bachelor's degree or higher are in jobs requiring only a high school diploma or less.

The labour-market headline: Canada's unemployment rate rose from about 5.0% in early 2023 to 6.7–6.8% by late 2025 / early 2026, with newcomer and youth unemployment running well above the headline. The TD Economics report in June 2025 — "Is the Dial-Back of Immigration Having the Intended Impact in Canada?" — concluded: yes, housing pressure is easing, the labour market is loosening, and wage growth is finally moderating.

Housing absorption and the CMHC supply gap

Mike Moffatt at the Smart Prosperity Institute argues that, in regions where housing completions cannot keep up with population growth, prices skyrocket. Ontario's 1.5 million-home target requires actual need closer to 1.7 million given recent population growth. CMHC's June 2025 update put the Canadian housing supply gap at 2.6 million units to restore 2019 affordability — requiring 430,000 to 480,000 new units annually for a decade, roughly double the current pace of about 234,000 annual housing starts. The earlier 2023 estimate of 3.5 million units assumed a target of 2004 affordability rather than 2019. See the house price to income compare page.

The composition of NPR growth made the housing problem worse. Most NPR-driven population growth concentrated in three CMAs: Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Construction capacity in those CMAs was already constrained by zoning and labour shortages. The Bank of Canada SDP 2025-8 makes the point that the immigration channel went from raising labour supply to raising housing demand without raising effective housing supply, because of where newcomers settled and what kind of housing was being built.

Fertility — both countries are at record lows

Both countries are below replacement and have hit record-low fertility. Canada's 2024 TFR is 1.25 (record low; British Columbia is at 1.02 — below 1.0 in 2023, the lowest recorded for any province). The United States 2024 TFR is 1.599, also a record low. The general fertility rate hit an all-time low of 53.8 births per 1,000 women aged 15–44. Total US births in 2024 were 3,628,934 (up 1% from 2023, despite the rate decline). Canada is now in the "ultra-low fertility" club (below 1.30) with Japan, Italy, and South Korea. The US sits in the "low" but not yet "ultra-low" range.

The implication: neither country can rely on natural increase for population growth. Both depend on immigration for any meaningful population growth, and both have just cut immigration sharply. The math suggests that, absent a sharp reversal in fertility (none is forecast in either country), the working-age population will start shrinking in both within a few years.

The aging dependency context

Canada's old-age dependency ratio (people 65+ per 100 working-age) hit 30.4% in 2024, up from about 25% in 2018. Statistics Canada's 2025–2075 demographic projection has the total dependency ratio rising to about 84 per 100 working-age by 2056. The pro-immigration demographic argument is real: Canada needs young workers to fund pensions and healthcare. But the recent NPR-heavy mix doesn't help much, because NPRs are temporary by definition, disproportionately fill low-wage jobs that don't generate the tax revenue per worker the system needs, and themselves age. The Diab framing — prioritise PR transitions for NPRs already in Canada rather than new arrivals — is at least partly a response to this critique.

What to watch in 2026

1. StatCan Q1 2026 quarterly demographic estimates (mid-June 2026, Table 17-10-0009). Will Canada's population decline continue for a third consecutive quarter? PBO is forecasting roughly flat 2026 growth.
2. PBO 2026 update to "Demographic Implications of the 2026-2028 Immigration Levels Plan." Watch the NPR baseline for 2026.
3. Census Bureau Vintage 2026 (typically December 2026). First full-year picture of population dynamics under the second year of Trump enforcement.
4. Pew Research follow-up to the August 2025 foreign-born population release. Watch whether the 1.4-million decline through June 2025 continues.
5. MPI annual analysis of the prior fiscal year of US enforcement (typically January).
6. CMHC Spring 2026 Housing Supply Report and the Fall 2026 update. Watch whether the supply gap shrinks meaningfully under slower population growth.
7. CDC NCHS provisional 2025 birth data (April/May 2026) and StatCan TFR for 2025 (typically September 2026).
8. 2027–2029 Canadian levels plan (likely fall 2026). Will the government continue the 5% NPR cap discipline or relax it as the working-age population starts shrinking?
9. Bank of Canada and Fed rate decisions. Slowing population growth removes a labour-supply tailwind, which should change MPC and FOMC NAIRU assumptions.

The stakes

Population growth is the single largest driver of measured per-capita GDP, the housing crisis, the labour-market story, and the long-run sustainability of public pensions and healthcare in both countries. The 2022–2024 Canadian surge was the most extreme demographic acceleration in G7 peacetime history, and it was justified by housing-supply, labour-shortage, and aging-population arguments that did not hold up. The reversal under Miller and Diab is now the largest immigration cut in modern Canadian history. The parallel US reversal under Trump enforcement has wiped about 1.4 million people from the foreign-born population in five months and cut net international migration by more than half.

The short version: Canada and the US both leaned on immigration through 2022–2024 to mask weak per-capita growth and weak natural increase, and both have now cut intake sharply for very different political reasons. Canada's reset is a deliberate policy choice tied to housing and labour-market absorption; the US reset is a deliberate policy choice tied to enforcement. The thing both governments are about to discover is whether their pre-surge narratives were correct — that population growth was driving real prosperity — or whether the per-capita data on the way back down show that the population channel was largely a numbers game. The Q1 2026 StatCan release will be the first hard read on whether Canada's population decline continues into a third consecutive quarter and whether the "back to 2019 affordability" framing actually starts to materialise in CMHC's data.