Canadian Urbanization Stalls: More People Snub Big Cities
Stephen Punwasi
January 14, 2026
The Great Canadian migration to small towns wasn’t just a pandemic blip—it’s just getting started. Statistics Canada (StatCan) just released its 2025 urban (CMA) population estimates, and it reveals urbanization has stalled for the first time in decades. This isn’t just slower population growth—urban residents and new immigrants are increasingly avoiding Canada’s largest, most expensive cities.
Canada’s urban population is slowing after years of growth were front loaded last year. The CMA population estimate reached 31.17 million people in 2025, up 1.0% (+309.2k people). At less than a third of the growth rate a year prior, it’s a dramatic decline. In terms of volume, the net change was just shy of the 329.7k people added per year between 2001 to 2019 on average.
At first, this likely sounds like a conflict with recent headlines, but there’s two important reasons to keep in mind. The first is StatCan takes these estimates on July 1st of each year, but headline data in quarterly estimates flatlines in Q3 2025. The decline should be even sharper in the estimates for 2026, as they will log the actual declines in previous quarters.
The second is only Canada’s urban population. It includes those in the 41 CMAs, the largest interconnected regions in the country. It fails to capture a new trend—urbanization has hit a wall.
Canadian urbanization is stalling as more residents flee the country’s largest metro regions. The CMA population represented 74.8% of the total population in 2025, unchanged from last year. Excluding the pandemic, this is the first time since at least the early 2000s that the urban share didn’t increase.
This isn’t just due to the population slowdown, but amplified by evolving preference. Canada added 80.1k people outside of CMAs in 2025, equivalent to 25.9% of the net change in CMAs. This was the largest share in at least 25 years, excluding the pandemic.
It’s not just local residents migrating either, but traditional immigration hubs have lost appeal. Only 65.3% of those who immigrated to Quebec settled in Greater Montreal, down from 83.1% five year prior. In Greater Toronto, the share fell to 60.5% from 76.1% over the same period.
The bottom line is Canada’s population growth is slowing but that doesn’t mean it’s not changing. After frontloading years of growth, the country is still adapting to excess demand stimulated. Why people are migrating from the city into smaller, even rural, regions may be a personal choice not covered in this data. However, it’s a problem that Canada has historically seen pop up at the end of real estate bubbles, as people seek affordability and more space.
www.betterdwelling.com/canadian-urbanization-stalls-more-people-snub-big-cities/
