Toronto: Canada’s population is expected to remain flat this year due to falling numbers of non-permanent residents or NPR, while only showing modest gains in the near future. This projection was part of a report submitted by Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer or PBO on Thursday.
“With the decline in the NPR population, PBO projects that Canada’s total population will remain flat in 2026. Population growth is expected to pick up only modestly to 0.3% in 2027, stabilising around 0.8% annually over the medium term, which is below its pre-2015 average of 1.1% per year,” the report stated. The PBO is responsible for providing economic and financial analysis to Parliament for the purposes of raising the quality of parliamentary debate and promoting greater budget transparency and accountability.
In its updated demographic projection, it anticipated that the number of NPRs in Canada, in decline since later 2024, “will continue to fall sharply”. NPRs include international students, temporary foreign workers, asylum claimants and visitors, among others. It added that while the number of NPRs as a percentage of the population peaked at 7.6% in 2024, it is expected to fall under 5% in 2027, which is also the Canadian government’s target.
The report pointed out that between 1972 and 2015, Canada’s population grew at a steady rate, averaging 1.1% per year. However, the sources of this growth shifted over time and in recent years, it was “driven almost entirely by net immigration”.
It said that after a long period of relative stability, annual permanent resident or PR admissions increased by nearly 80% between 2015 and 2024, from 272,000 to 484,000, as intake targets were raised with successive immigration levels plans.
But, it noted, NPRs were the “primary driver of recent population dynamics”. Net inflows of NPRs beginning in 2016 pushed annual population growth above 1%. After the dip in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, net inflows surged to nearly 800,000 in 2023, driving total population growth in that year to a record-high 1.2 million, or 3.1%.
It pointed out that historically, the share of NPRs in the population was below 3%, even as recently as 2017. It assumed that the share of NPRs in the population “will stabilise at just under 5%, a level still well above its historical norm.”
According to the quarterly population estimates released by Statistics Canada or StatCan, Canada recorded its largest quarterly decline in population in at least 80 years between July and September 2025, with the reduction attributed to a decrease in temporary resident numbers.
According to population estimates published by StatCan, the country’s data agency, at the time, the decrease between the second and third quarters of 2025 amounted to 76,068 persons, or 0.2%.
Going by StatCan data dating back to 1946, there hasn’t been a sharper decline in the country’s population. The last time Canada’s population fell was during the pandemic, when it dropped marginally in the last quarter to 2020 over the previous three-month period. That decrease was marginal, at just 1,232 persons.