The latest demographic data from Canada showed the male population increasing by 3.4 percent, while females grew by only 2.9 percent, the widest disparity between the sexes in almost half a century.
Analysts pointed to heavy immigration from military-age males as a driving force in the demographic shift.
Bloomberg BNN noted on Thursday that almost all of Canada’s net population growth is due to immigration, “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,” BNN said.
The male-female imbalance in Canada is even more pronounced among young people, where the male population grew 4.8 percent but females grew only 3.9 percent. Demographic analysts pointed out that older, homogenous populations in advanced economies usually skew female because women live longer, but heavy immigration tends to bring in large numbers of young men.
Canada’s two largest sources of immigrants are India and the Philippines. The Indian Canadian community has been much in the news lately due to the murder of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Vancouver in June 2023. A major diplomatic conflict broke out in September after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly accused the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of assassinating Nijjar.
2023 saw a remarkable 167-percent increase in the number of students from Ghana studying in Canada, with particular enthusiasm for earning degrees in information technology and medicine. Overall, India has the most students in Canada, followed by China and the Philippines.
Like most industrialized nations, Canada is aging – lower birth rates and longer life spans are shifting the median age higher, which is a big problem for countries that expect young workers to finance benefits for elderly retirees and pensioners.
Canada has long been enthusiastic about addressing this problem by importing young workers from other countries. As of 2023, immigrants comprised about one-sixth of the Canadian population. Most of the countries experiencing the most severe population collapses, like China, Japan, and South Korea, have traditionally been more reluctant to encourage large-scale immigration.