Population growth will likely be all immigration by 2030
JILL MAHONEY
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Immigration is fuelling two-thirds of Canada's population growth and will likely become the only source of gains by 2030, according to a national census snapshot released yesterday.
Statistics Canada also found the country's population increase was the highest of the G8 industrialized nations between 2001 and 2006. At 31.6 million, the number of Canadians grew by 1.6 million, or 5.4 per cent.
The expansion, however, is largely concentrated in a handful of urban areas that attract most of the country's newcomers.
"Immigration is the real driver for the population growth in Canada," said Rosemary Bender, Statscan's director-general responsible for census content. "This is an increasing trend."
If Statscan's projections prove accurate, having a higher proportion of immigrants would spark increasing urbanization, especially in Greater Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, which could lead to more traffic congestion, higher pollution levels and overburdened public-transit systems.
And the face of the country would change, with visible minorities, who now comprise most newcomers, becoming the majority in big cities. More immigrants would also translate into increased political clout for ethnic communities.
But social tensions could also rise, with strains on schools and workplaces as newcomers struggle to adjust to a country that most believe does a poor job of helping them.
"Just bringing in immigrants and dropping them down in Canada is not sufficient," said David Foot, a University of Toronto economics professor and demographics expert.
The census also revealed:
Alberta and Ontario drove two-thirds of the country's population increase. Most of the remainder occurred in British Columbia and Quebec.
At 10.6 per cent, or twice the national average, Alberta had the highest growth between 2001 and 2006.
The largest decline was in Newfoundland, which had 7,461 fewer people, a drop of 1.5 per cent. Its population also fell in the previous two censuses.
Quebec's growth rate was 4.3 per cent, three times as high as the previous census period -- largely because of higher immigration and fewer people moving to other provinces. As well, births increased in the province in 2006.
More than four-fifths of Canadians, or nearly 25 million people, live in urban areas. And nearly half live in the three largest urban areas: Greater Montreal, Greater Vancouver and the so-called Greater Golden Horseshoe in Southern Ontario. Largely because of immigration, these three areas grew by 950,000 between 2001 and 2006, representing more than half the country's total population growth.
Two-thirds of Ontarians -- and one-quarter of all Canadians -- live in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, which spans 100 municipalities along the western end of Lake Ontario. The area, which was home to 8.1 million people in 2006, grew by 8.4 per cent in the census period, higher than the provincial average of 6.6 per cent.
Edge cities surrounding the central parts of Canada's 33 urban areas had a growth rate of 11.1 per cent, double the national average.
The midsize urban centres, with populations of 10,000 or more, that experienced the largest declines were all in British Columbia: Kitimat, Prince Rupert, Quesnel, Terrace and Williams Lake.
The country's rural population increased by just 1 per cent between 2001 and 2006, with less than one in five Canadians living in rural areas.
Statscan predicts that net international migration will be the country's only source of population growth by 2030 because deaths will likely outnumber births in the next two decades or so. Indeed, Canada's fertility rate now hovers around 1.5 children per woman, less than the replacement rate of 2.1 children. And the baby boomers, who are now between the ages of 40 and 60 and form the largest segment of the population, are entering the back end of their lifespans.
Canada, which accepts an average of 240,000 immigrants a year, has the highest per-capita immigration rate among industrialized countries. Newcomers drove 66 per cent of the country's population growth in the most recent census period, significantly higher than between 1996 and 2001, when they resulted in 58 per cent of the increase.
"It's not that immigration is just happening; we really need it if we're going to grow," said Ryan Berlin, a demographer at Urban Futures, a Vancouver-based research institute.
Canada will need to better integrate immigrants, many of whom have trouble finding jobs suitable to their skills, have lower incomes than native-born Canadians and are more alienated, experts said.
"That problem is going to become more pressing, in a way, as the immigrant population becomes a larger and larger proportion of our work force," said Jeffrey Reitz, a University of Toronto sociology professor who specializes in immigration issues.
However, having more immigrants should result in better political representation, especially in big cities -- although Prof. Reitz said "it will be a slow process."
But some observers also warned that if immigrants cannot find jobs suited to their educations and skills, social tensions may increase.
"If that comes to be seen as a negative, that immigration is not contributing to a kind of overall positive to the country, then I'm afraid that we could have some backlashes as they're having elsewhere," said Rod Beaujot, a sociology professor and demographer at the University of Western Ontario. "Immigration works for Canada . . . but we have to be careful that it continues to be a positive."
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Friday, March 16th, 2007
Canada's population growth will likely be all immigration by 2030
