Population goes … boom!

Cities reach for the sky as our population has grown since the 1960s .

New demographic tides mean change for Canada, Quebec and for anglos

At elementary school in the mid-1960s, I used to love browsing through the Canadian Oxford School Atlas: its colour-coded maps highlighted details of our geography and economy, with lots of population numbers.

One vivid memory is that, after the 1961 census, Canada boasted 18 million people. So, it was quite an eye-opener when we broke the 20-million mark in 1966 —right on time for the Centennial year and Expo 67. It didn’t end there.

Hang on to your hats: in 2023, an extraordinary year for growth and immigration, Canada bounced over the 40-million mark, reported Statistics Canada. The country is twice as populous as it was 60 years ago, and headed higher.

Growth and disruption

Canada, once a smallish colonial outlier, could grow as large in coming decades as European countries such as Spain (now 47 million). Later in the 21st century, we might even match Italy and Britain.

But growth means change, and often disruption. Since the mid-1950s, the population of Quebec has doubled, while Ontario tripled and Alberta … quadrupled. Cities like Winnipeg and Montreal were knocked off their perches by cities in faster-growing regions. (After industrial Ontario grew rapidly in the 1940s, the Toronto stock exchange leaped past that of Montreal in 1947; it never looked back.) And onetime top ethnic groups—Ukrainian, Italian, Greek—have steadily receded as waves of Chinese, Spanish and Arabic-speaking newcomers flourished in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.

In May 2023, Canada reached a new top population, as reported by the national statistics agency.

Crucially, the national equilibrium between Quebec and the rest of Canada eroded, as the province declined from about 28 to 22.5 per cent of the national population. This erosion of French provoked anxieties about immigration and cultural status.

On the plus side, Quebec has inched toward its own milestone: on March 8 2024 it officially broke through the 9-million population mark. After this, Quebecers can see another big headline number— 10 million— on the horizon. Maybe some imaginative political leader will promote that as a goal or symbol of national pride. Stay tuned.

How dynamic has Quebec been, demographically? Plenty of people criticize Quebec’s political volatility and statist economic impulses. They say this means slower growth than elsewhere in Canada. In the big picture, however, Quebec’s attractiveness has been about average.

Compared to other large Canadian provinces, similar-sized U.S. states (Massachusetts, Virginia, New Jersey) or comparable countries (Sweden, Switzerland), Quebec has grown less rapidly than some, but clearly faster than others (see table).

Quebec vs. its peers: Who grew most?

Ontario and Alberta have been super-charged in recent decades, growing almost as fast as Sunbelt states like Texas and Florida. Against these competitors, Quebec’s growth looks pretty meh.

A more fitting comparator for Quebec is Massachusetts. Each is a Northeastern jurisdiction in North America, with an older industrial base and a historic metropolis. Each has been a victim of the westward pull of the economy. In the late 1960s they were still the same size: Massachusetts had 5.7 million people while Quebec had 5.8 million.

Yet somehow Quebec left Massachusetts behind, gaining 1.8 million more new people than the U.S. state. Metropolitan Montreal, despite some deep slumps, also grew faster than Boston. It gained an extra 600,000 residents to pull even:  by 2024, metro Montreal and Boston were home to 4.3 and 4.4 million people, respectively.

Migration trends reversed for anglos

Anglos of course have felt their own anxieties, some justified but others not. Their population and place in Quebec have been unsettled. Most demographic fears, however, are not supported by StatsCan data (I discussed this in a blog examining the 2016 census results; see http://tinyurl.com/Anglo-Numbers ).

Overall, English-speaking residents have stayed within a range of 850,000 to 1.2 million total, depending on the census metric (either maternal or “most-used” language). After visibly declining in the 1970s then flatlining in the 1980s and ‘90s, Quebec anglophone numbers renewed their growth after 2000, growing about 2 per cent each census period.

“Quebec-to-Ontario migration trend has flipped”, headlined a Globe and Mail report in April 2022. It added that “the trend [has] reversed: more Ontario residents moved to Quebec [in 2021] than the other way around, according to Statistics Canada”.

“The skyrocketing cost of homes in the Toronto area, and the possibility of remote work, are likely factors“, concluded the newspaper. And anglos already living in Quebec moved around—to lower-cost suburbs and far-off “exurbs” outside Montreal and Ottawa.

 “English rising in Vaudreuil-Soulanges”, trumpeted The Gazette in 2022.

“Goodbye Westmount. Hello Vaudreuil-Soulanges … There was a 14.2 per cent increase in the number of English mother-tongue Quebecers” in the suburban municipality west of Montreal, said the report, citing the findings of McGill census expert Jack Jedwab. The “suburbanization” of metro Ottawa-Gatineau meant anglo growth there, too.

The Gazette listed several suburban communities where anglo numbers had risen sharply between census years, notably Laval (a 12.8 per cent increase) and Gatineau (10.3 per cent). For its part, the Townships’ metropolis saw a 6.2 per cent English increase, as Sherbrooke’s anglo population quietly expanded.

All these facts and figures made me wonder about that 1960s-era Oxford School Atlas. So I went online, found one on eBay, and bought it. As I again flipped through the pages of the evocative old atlas, I thought: Was the smaller Canada that I studied there a more comfortable place, or was that a mirage?

The past often looks less tumultuous. But life means growth, with all its challenges. We need to embrace them.

Article originally published in Sherbrooke Record’s “Townships Weekend” supplement, March 8, 2024.