Canada’s population has reached 40 million, amid a wave of new immigrants as part of Ottawa’s promise to bring in 500,000 people a year by 2025, Statistics Canada said.
According to Canada Statistics, the 40-million milestone reached faster than expected, as the country added 1.1 million people in 2022, most of them permanent and temporary immigrants.
It is double the figure the federal government had planned to welcome over 430,000 new permanent residents last year.
Canada’s lenient immigration policy has allowed people from across the world, with a special focus on war-tor countries including Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine to migrate to Canada in large numbers.
According to Canada Statistics, 2022 was the first year in which the country’s population grew by more than a million in a 12-month period, with 95.5 percent of that growth being international migration.
Meanwhile, the U.S. population is around 335 million, nearly 200 million more than that of Canada.
If the current immigration levels remain, Canada’s population could reach 50 million in two decades, according to Statistics Canada.
The swift rise in Canada’s population growth is directly linked to the country’s lenient immigration policy. Over the past years, Canada has introduced several immigration schemes through which eligible people from different parts of the world moved to the vast country.
Ontario is Canada’s most populous province with almost 15.6 million people, while Quebec comes a distant second at 8.8 million.
