People walk down a busy street in downtown Calgary. A sharp drop in the number of temporary residents contributed to an overall population decline of more than 100,000 people last year.Todd Korol/The Globe and Mail
Canada’s population declined by more than 100,000 people in 2025, marking the first annual decline in records that date back to the 1940s, as the federal government tries to rein in the number of temporary residents in the country.
The population decreased by 103,504 people, or 0.25 per cent, between Oct. 1, 2025, and Jan. 1, 2026, according to new estimates from Statistics Canada. This followed a decline of roughly 76,000 in the third quarter.
Because of modest growth in the first half of 2025, this amounted to a population decline of around 102,000 last year. The current population stands at 41,472,081 people.
The decline is being driven by a continued exodus of temporary residents from the country, a result of a series of measures introduced by Ottawa in 2024 and 2025 to curb the number of non-permanent residents in the country.
Indeed, there was a dramatic decline in the non-permanent resident population last quarter, a group that is mainly made up of international students and foreign workers. Specifically, the number of non-permanent residents decreased by 171,296 in this period, bringing the total population of temporary residents to 2.67 million, or 6.4 per cent of the total population.
Ottawa has set a target of reducing the temporary resident share to 5 per cent of the total population by the end of 2027. This share had peaked at 7.6 per cent in October, 2024, a result of two years of high immigration levels during the pandemic, especially in terms of the number of international students that came to Canada.
“We’re now fully in an era of normalization, with population growth of around zero expected through 2027, before settling back to a baseline of just under one per cent,” said Robert Kavcic, senior economist at Bank of Montreal in a Wednesday morning note.
The Statscan data also showed a sharp year-over-year decline of almost 20 per cent in the number of permanent resident admissions to Canada, in line with a target established by the federal government to shrink inflows. Still, new permanent immigrants helped to mitigate the population decline caused by the drop in temporary residents.