Canada’s Population Finally Shrinks
The Great Temp Purge Finally Bites
Hey, Canada just hit a milestone nobody saw coming a couple years ago: our population actually dropped. For the first time since the COVID lockdowns, on December 17, 2025 StatsCan reported we lost about 76,000 people in the third quarter of 2025, shrinking to 41.6 million. That’s a 0.2% dip – small, but historic outside pandemic weirdness. And yeah, it’s the biggest quarterly drop in non-permanent residents on record.
But let’s cut to the chase: this isn’t about fewer babies or more deaths. It’s almost entirely because of temporary residents bailing out. Non-permanent residents—think international students, temporary foreign workers, and their families—plummeted by a record 176,479 in one quarter. That’s the largest drop since 1971. They went from over 3 million (7.3% of the population) in July to about 2.85 million (6.8%) by October.
Why the mass exit? After years of cranking up temporary visas to juice the economy—peaking at insane levels post-pandemic—the government flipped the script. Caps on study permits, tighter work rules for spouses, and a goal to slash temporary residents down to 5% of the population by 2027. Record-high permit expirations (339,505 outflows vs. just 163,026 new arrivals) did the rest.
Look, the boom in temps was a disaster waiting to happen. Politicians flooded the country with hundreds of thousands of students and workers without building homes, hospitals, or transit to match. Rents exploded, shelves emptied in grocery stores, wait times ballooned. It was cheap-labor economics on steroids: prop up GDP numbers while per-capita living standards tanked. We got “growth” that felt like a squeeze.
Now the reversal is here, and yeah, it’s messy. Permanent immigration stayed solid at 102,867 new folks that quarter, offsetting some loss. But with temps fleeing—especially students (down tens of thousands)—provinces like Ontario and BC are feeling the pinch hardest.
Critics will whine about labor shortages and slower growth, but come on: this was unsustainable. Businesses got addicted to an endless stream of low-wage temps instead of training Canadians or boosting productivity. Maybe now rents cool, housing eases up, and per-capita GDP rebounds after years of decline.
Is this the harsh medicine we needed, or just another policy whiplash that’ll swing back? For now, the temporary resident party is crashing hard—and honestly, it’s about time we cleaned up the mess.
