Immigration Surge Fuels Male Population Boom in Canada

“What we’ve seen in the last 10 years is that the growth rate in the male population has steadily been rising faster than the female population in that age group. It seems to be something a little bit more permanent,” Porter said in an interview.

The figures highlight the country’s changing demographic trends due to its liberal immigration policy, which aims to rapidly expand the pool of workers to stave long-term economic decline from an aging populace.

Canada’s population growth accelerated to 3.2% over a one-year period to Oct. 1, faster than any Group of Seven nation, China or India. Almost all of the increase was driven by a surge in international migration, especially among foreign students and temporary workers.

From the late 1970s to around the early 2010s, Canada’s population increasingly skewed female, but the trend has been reversing over the past decade as the male cohort grew faster. In 2022, the gap between men and women was at its narrowest in more than 30 years.

Globally, advanced economies with older populations tend to have more women because they generally live longer. Countries with a higher share of young people, on the other hand, tend to skew male, while government policies can amplify that disparity. Large migrant worker populations have also led to wide sex imbalances in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

“The issue is less economic in the short term than it is social and economic in the long term,” said Armine Yalnizyan, a labor economist and a research fellow at the Atkinson Foundation, an equality-focused charitable group.

“Because it means that we are putting the premium on dealing with labor shortages and economic needs and forgetting that we are humans who need to form families, who get sick, who get old.”