Canada’s new immigration curbs have slowed increases in population, but government projections of near-zero growth over the next two years are likely “off the mark,” said an economist with Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
Statistics Canada expects the population growth rate to slow to 0.3 per cent in 2025, from 1.8 per cent last year, before contracting 0.2 per cent in 2026. But the agency is overestimating the number of temporary residents who will leave once their visas expire, failing to count people holding long-term visitor permits and understating the amount of likely asylum seekers, the bank’s Deputy Chief Economist Benjamin Tal said in a report Monday.
After correcting for those issues, Tal projects the growth rate to be 1.1 per cent this year and around one per cent next year.
The higher-than-forecast growth, if realized, may worsen Canada’s housing shortage after it was already exacerbated by a post-pandemic immigration boom, according to Tal. He was among the first economists to warn during that period that policymakers were underestimating population growth.
“The housing crisis of the last decade was in many ways a planning issue as under-counting of population growth has resulted in a suboptimal increase in housing supply,” he said in the report. “We fear that we are in a process of repeating past mistakes.”
Randy Thanthong-Knight, Bloomberg News
