By Toronto Star
Canada’s population is booming. This past month, it hit the 40-million mark.
The growth has been remarkable, but hardly even across the country, over the years.
That’s partly because Canada’s growth is being fuelled by immigration, rather than its “natural” birth rate, and immigrants are settling in some familiar areas much more than others.
The trend over recent decades points to the challenges of Canada’s immigration growth: How does a country get newcomers where they are most needed? And how can it help them successfully settle there?
The federal government plans to bring in historic levels of immigrants in the years ahead, and provinces and employers are clamouring for more workers.
Yet experts question whether there has been the planning needed to make sure newcomers can thrive, especially as they increasingly move to communities outside the big three cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
