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People walk on Mont-Royal Street in Montreal. Canada’s population declined in the third quarter, marking a major shift from the growth seen during the pandemic.Andrej Ivanov/The Globe and Mail
Canada’s population fell by roughly 76,000 over the third quarter, the largest decline this country has seen in records dating to the 1940s, and a result of major policy changes by Ottawa to curb immigration.
Outside of a slight drop during the pandemic, this is the first time Canada’s population has declined in the country’s history, based on historical data dating back to 1946. The decline was driven by a drop in the number of international students, more than a year after the federal government started imposing caps on study permits.
The country’s population declined by 0.2 per cent in the third quarter of 2025, after almost a year of near-zero population growth. The current population stands at 41,575,585 people, according to new estimates from Statistics Canada released Wednesday.
“A major population adjustment is well underway, and it remains one of the biggest economic stories in Canada,” said Robert Kavcic, senior economist at Bank of Montreal, in a Wednesday-morning note.
This demographic pattern stands in sharp contrast to the pandemic years, when there were numerous quarters of dramatic population growth from a large inflow of international students and foreign workers. In the third quarter of 2023, for example, Canada saw its highest quarterly population growth rate since 1957, with 420,000 people added to the country over that three-month span.
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The federal government has set a goal of reducing the number of non-permanent residents in Canada to 5 per cent of the total population by the end of 2027. That number now stands at 6.8 per cent of the total population, compared to 7.3 per cent last quarter.
As of Oct. 1, there were about 2.85 million temporary residents in Canada, compared to slightly over three million on July 1.
The proportion of temporary residents in Canada grew significantly between 2021 and 2024, the result of a series of immigration policy changes during the pandemic that incentivized international students to study and stay in Canada. A temporary spike in job vacancies over 2021 and 2022 also led employers to demand that the government increase its intake of temporary foreign workers. On July 1, 2021, there were approximately 1.36 million non-permanent residents in Canada (3.6 per cent of the population), and by Oct. 1, 2024, that number had increased to 3.15 million people, or 7.6 per cent of the total population.
“We’ve argued all along that the explosion in population growth — to nearly 1.3 million people within a year at one point — was playing a major role in many economic issues Canadian policymakers have been struggling to deal with,” wrote Mr. Kavcic, referring to problems with housing affordability, surging rent prices, and stress on infrastructure.
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In 2024, in an attempt to manage growing anti-immigrant sentiment linked to the high number of temporary residents, the Liberal government embarked on an immigration policy U-turn, limiting the number of study permits it issued to colleges and universities, as well as reducing the cap of foreign workers it allowed into the country.
The policies are beginning to work. Statscan data showed that there were roughly 73,000 fewer study permit holders in Canada in the third quarter of 2025, a sizable drop that was concentrated in Ontario and British Columbia.
Both these provinces saw their first annual population declines on record.
All provinces and territories had fewer people this past quarter, except Alberta and Nunavut, which saw population growth of 0.2 per cent each.
