The number of millennials officially outnumbered the baby boomer generation in Canada last summer, according to new data from Statistics Canada, largely due to the influx of younger immigrants coming into the country.
Additionally, the average age of the country decreased from July 1, 2022, to July 1, 2023, for the first time since 1958.
As of July 1, 2023, the millennial generation (born between 1981 and 1996) officially accounted for a greater proportion of the population than baby boomers (born 1946 to 1965).
“The baby boomer generation became the largest in the population in 1958, seven years before the last baby boomer was even born. For 65 years, they remained the largest generation in the Canadian population. From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, baby boomers accounted for around 40% of the population,” reads the report from Statistics Canada.
“By comparison, millennials’ demographic weight will never reach the level of baby boomers’ and is expected to peak at its current level of 23%, according to the most recent population projections.”
Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) has also grown dramatically, becoming the third-largest generation in Canada, after surpassing Generation X (born between 1966 and 1980).
The report noted that people from Generation X were born during a time of declining fertility rates and, therefore, could never have been the country’s largest generation.
Generation Z is projected to surpass millennials between 2038 and 2053.
The increase in millennials and Generation Z is primarily due to the record number of temporary foreign workers and international students Canada has taken in, with the millennial generation receiving 457,354 new people from those sources alone in the span of a year.
Those figures surpass the youngest cohort of the population, Generation Alpha, those born after 2013, of whom the majority were born in Canada.
“The median age, which divides the population into two groups of equal size, also fell, from 40.9 to 40.6 years over the same period. This is the first time in 65 years that the mean and median ages of the population have both fallen in the same year. This last happened between 1957 and 1958, driven by the birth of the large baby boomer cohorts,” reads the report.
Among all the five-year age groups, those aged 30 t0 34 grew the fastest over the July 1, 2022 to July 1, 2023 timeframe.
Newfoundland and Labrador was the province with the highest average age, being 45.7 years old. It also had the highest number of people aged 65 years and older, making up 24.4% of the province’s total population.
The Prairies had the youngest population, with Alberta’s average age being 39.1 years and also the province with the lowest cohort of people aged 65 years and older at 15.1%.
The largest cohort of baby boomers reside in Atlantic Canada and Quebec, however millennials have surpassed boomers in both Ontario and British Columbia.
As for those numbers broken down by men and women, they remain relatively equal.
“Canada’s population was virtually evenly balanced between the number of women+ (20,084,054) and the number of men+ (20,013,707) on July 1, 2023,” reads the report.
“The ratio of the number of men+ to 100 women+ varied little from the late 1980s to 2016, fluctuating from 98.0 to 98.5. This ratio has risen slightly in recent years, reaching 99.6 as of July 1, 2023.”
The slight increase in more women than men is a result of women having a longer life expectancy than men.
