Canadians are leaving for good – in record numbers
Right. Let's talk about something that most politicians in Ottawa would rather discuss in the same way one discusses a dodgy smell in a lift — briefly, awkwardly, and while staring firmly at the floor.
Canadians are leaving. In enormous numbers. And not just the temporary residents and international students everyone's been reading about, though there are plenty of those too. We're talking about actual, real, born-here, hockey-watching, poutine-eating Canadians — packing up, saying a polite sorry to the neighbours, and heading for the exits.
The numbers are genuinely alarming
According to Statistics Canada, 106,134 people left Canada for good in 2024 — the highest number of annual emigrants recorded since 1967. And 2025 picked up precisely where 2024 left off: in the first six months alone, 54,530 people departed, the most ever recorded in the first half of a calendar year. Historical patterns suggest the second half is always busier, which means 2025 could be Canada's biggest year for waving goodbye since records began.
The Economist, in a wide-ranging analysis of emigration from 31 Western nations, noted that Canada's departures in the third quarter of 2025 were 34% higher than six years earlier. Canadian net emigration — the series Statistics Canada maintains for long-term consistency — reached 65,372 in 2024-25, the highest level in the 50-year data series.
And if you're wondering where the pain is worst, the answer is Ontario. In 2024, Ontario accounted for nearly 48% of all Canadian emigrants, despite representing only 39% of the population. That means Ontarians are leaving at a rate roughly 20% above the national average. In the first quarter of 2025, over 50% of everyone who left Canada came from Ontario — a new all-time provincial record. British Columbia isn't far behind, contributing 18.5% of national departures despite being home to only 13.8% of the population.
Quebec, characteristically, is doing its own thing. Despite making up over 21% of Canada's population, it accounts for barely 12% of emigrants. Make of that what you will. Perhaps universal daycare, lower tuition fees and a cultural conviction that Paris is overrated is doing the trick.
Who's actually leaving?
This is where the story goes from worrying to properly frightening. A Bank of Canada research paper found that roughly 40% of Canadians who would rank in the top 1% of earners have emigrated south of the border, along with between 30% and 50% of the next nine income percentiles. Canadian-born individuals in the United States are more educated than native-born Americans, earn substantially more, and cluster disproportionately in top income brackets.
These patterns, the research finds, account for three-quarters of the Canada-US GDP per adult gap and up to two-thirds of the labour productivity gap.
In other words, Canada isn't losing people. It's losing its best people. The ones who would have been buying a four-bedroom detached in Oakville, remortgaging to fund a business, or trading up from a condo in Burnaby to a townhouse in North Vancouver.
Where are Canada's 2.8 million expats?
Estimated number of Canadian citizens living abroad by country. The US dominates — but European and Asia-Pacific destinations are growing.
Sources: UN Population Division (2024) via Migration Policy Institute; Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada (2010); Statistics Canada; Wikipedia Canadian diaspora article.
Chart: Canadian Mortgage Professional.
A 2024 survey by the Ottawa Science Policy Network found that nearly two in three current graduate students (64%) report being likely to move abroad upon completing their degree, with finances and job opportunities cited as the primary reasons. These are not people who intend to remain in Canada's housing market. These are people actively planning their departure.
The population catastrophe nobody wanted to mention
Here's the headline that should be hanging over every housing forecast in the country: Canada's population shrank in 2025. According to Statistics Canada, the population stood at 41,472,081 on January 1, 2026 — a decrease of just over 102,000 from the start of 2025. This is the first annual net decline in residents since Confederation.
To be clear, the bulk of this decline was driven not by emigrating Canadians but by the sharp reduction in non-permanent residents — international students and temporary foreign workers — as the federal government implemented aggressive policy changes to bring temporary resident numbers down from a peak of 7.6% of the population. These are policy choices with legitimate rationale. But they are population choices, and population is the oxygen that the housing market breathes.
Read next: Canada posts first population drop in decades amid immigration slowdown
In Ontario and British Columbia — the two provinces suffering the most acute housing market pain — populations actually fell outright for the first time on record. TD Economics has delivered a steep downgrade to its 2026 housing forecasts for precisely this reason, noting that "Canada's population declined last year for the first time since Confederation, driven by losses in Ontario and B.C." and that "softer rental demand and falling rents are discouraging investor activity in both provinces."
So what does this mean for mortgages?
This is the bit the industry needs to sit with, because it's genuinely complicated.
The straightforward reading is: fewer people, less housing demand. And there's evidence for that. Advertised rents across Canada fell to a 33-month low in February 2026, after 17 consecutive months of declines, according to data from Urbanation and Rentals.ca. The condo market — which was already struggling — has gone from difficult to grim, with Toronto and Vancouver prices expected to decline by a further 3-4% in 2026 according to Royal LePage. The MLS Home Price Index benchmark sits at $661,300 as of February 2026, down 4.8% year-on-year, according to CREA — close to prices last seen in the spring of 2021.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's own 2026 Housing Market Outlook is notably sombre, projecting real GDP growth of just 0.7% for 2026 — one of the weakest years in recent decades outside an actual recession. RBC Economics expects home resales to remain below the pre-pandemic five-year average of 511,000 units even with a projected 7.9% rebound in 2026. TD Economics, meanwhile, has trimmed Ontario and British Columbia's 2026 GDP forecasts amid the population decline.
But here's the important caveat, and mortgage professionals ignore this at their peril. The emigration of high-earning Canadians is not the same problem as the departure of temporary residents. When a temporary foreign worker completes their visa and goes home, they leave behind a vacated rental unit. When a 35-year-old software engineer who grew up in Mississauga decides Canada can no longer offer them a fair shot at homeownership and takes a job in Seattle instead, they leave behind a mortgage that was never written, a house that was never bought, and a chain that was never completed.
Read next: Canada’s rental vacancy rate to hit highest level in a decade: RBC
The Bank of Canada held its policy rate at 2.75% in early 2026, with CREA forecasting that the national average home price will rise just 2.8% in 2026 to approximately $698,881. That's not collapse. The housing market is not about to fall off a cliff. But it is a market that has now lost several years of population momentum, is navigating a condo correction of real severity, and is shedding the very demographic cohort — young, educated, ambitious, first-time buyers — that traditionally drives demand in precisely the markets now under the most pressure.
The honest assessment
Canada spent most of the 2010s worrying it was building too few homes for too many people. It is now, for the first time in living memory, in a situation where the people and the homes are heading in the same direction at the same time — both contracting.
The Economist's analysis of Western emigration is clear: people are leaving because of taxes, politics, and the sense that their country no longer offers a compelling deal. In Canada's case, you can add unaffordable housing, stagnant wages and a GDP-per-capita crisis that has seen Canada fall steadily behind the United States for a decade. The irony that the very cost of housing is helping drive away the people most needed to sustain it is almost too neat to be believed.
For mortgage brokers, the medium-term picture outside of Ontario and British Columbia remains decent. CREA sees stronger price growth in Saskatchewan, Quebec and Newfoundland. Alberta continues to attract interprovincial migrants and is the one large province bucking the population decline. The interest rate environment, while not as benign as was expected before the Middle East conflict complicated global energy markets, is still structurally lower than 2023.
But Ontario and BC face a reckoning that is partly demand-driven, partly supply-driven, and now also — let's be honest about this — partly driven by the fact that Canada has spent several years making it extremely difficult for its own people to build a life here. And some of them, quite reasonably, have decided to go and build it somewhere else instead.
Polite they may be. But they have left, all the same.
