While Canada may be experiencing record high population growth, there is an exodus of its citizens, with emigration or reverse immigration, surging this year.
The outflow of citizens in the last three months has only been higher three other times in the past century, according to data from Statistics Canada.
More and more Canadian residents are leaving to go live in foreign countries, with emigration up 3% in the last quarter.
In the last 73 years of data collection, only three other years have seen larger quarterly emigration numbers – 2016, 1967 and 1965.
In 2016, a record high exodus occurred and that trend has continued with higher than average emigration becoming normalized.
Quarterly outflows from 2016 onward have been almost 50% higher than previously.
Canada is currently on track to hitting 79% of the outflow recorded last year, with 74,017 emigrants so far year to date.
Even if the final quarter of 2023 is lower than the previous two years, it will still be one of the biggest years for outflow on record.
This reality can easily be ignored because of the simultaneously high influx of record high immigration, as policy makers tend to point to the net increase as a way to ignore the issue.
The main question that this outflow raises is, if Canadians most familiar with the country see no opportunity in staying here, how could immigrants?
The trend of onward migration, where immigrants arrive in Canada and then subsequently leave, has been steadily increasing since the 1980s.
The number of permanent residents who pursued citizenship within 10 years of their arrival dropped by 40% between 2001 and 2021.
This could be because Canada continues to fall behind other Organization for Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries by a number of measurements from least amount of doctors per capita to education standards.
