Canada's Huge Influx of Non-Permanent Residents
According to a June story in the Canadian Press News, descriptions of a giant spike in immigration into Canada found on social media are misleading.
Statistics Canada said the original chart showing migration shooting up after 2021 is flawed.
“The figure is not an accurate picture of Canada’s migration patterns,” a spokesman for Statistics Canada said in an email.
The user who made the chart said they used a formula to calculate the annual net migration figures that included inflows and outflows of non-permanent residents. However, those figures are only available after the third quarter in 2021.
While the X user that created the chart may have been creative in their accounting and the Statistics Canada quote is technically right, their response is misleading.
Beginning in 2022, Statistics Canada data shows a large net influx of non-permanent migrants into the country—foreign nationals without a formal immigration process that don’t leave within a year—without any need for additional calculations.
Prior to 2015, the largest annual net influx of non-permanent residents was 138,000. In 2023 alone it was 821,000.
Net emigration—those seeking to stay permanently through formal applications—hasn’t changed much. In 2023 it was about 49,000 and in 2015 it was almost 57,000.
Little Mention of The Change In News Media
Outside of that Press News article there’s little mention of the influx in Canadian news or otherwise. There are stories about Canada limiting its immigration targets by 12 percent except for those from French speaking countries, but that isn’t about non-permanent residents who don't currently have a path to citizenship.
A January 2025 BBC story on Canadian immigration is filled with anecdotes about perceived Canadian immigration and how that might have sunk Justin Trudeau’s political career, but it lacks any numerical detail on the scale of Canadian immigration.
A recent Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) story highlights how Canada’s population growth is currently at zero percent in 2025 so far because of new restrictions on immigration. Without immigration, Canada’s population is declining as there are more deaths than births.
While it doesn’t mention the sharp uptick in non-permanent residents, it gently walks around the issue by only talking about immigration statistics when it wasn’t exploding—before 2022 and after 2024:
“However, prior to 2022, Canada had never welcomed more than 86,246 immigrants in a first quarter (which occurred in the first quarter of 2016),” the agency said.