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MONTREAL — Despite a downward trend, Quebec still reported nearly record-high population growth last year due to immigration, even as the province’s fertility rate reached its lowest level on record.
Non-permanent residents – including temporary foreign workers, international students and asylum seekers – were responsible for much of the province’s population growth in 2024, according to a new report from Quebec’s statistics agency.
Quebec’s total population increased by about 155,000 in 2024, due entirely to immigration, and reached about 9.1 million in January 2025. That’s down from the record growth of nearly 200,000 people in 2023, but is otherwise the highest increase on record, even as deaths outnumbered births in the province for the first time.
Premier François Legault has made reducing temporary immigration one of his top priorities, and has called on the federal government to halve the number of non-permanent residents in the province. He claims temporary immigrants are putting pressure on housing, health care and education.
According to the new report, nearly 159,000 newcomers came to Quebec in 2024. Population growth stayed high during the first six months of the year, the report says, but slowed in the second half of the year and returned to pre-pandemic levels in the last quarter.
About two-thirds of the immigrants were non-permanent residents. As of January 2025, Quebec was home to about 617,000 temporary immigrants, according to the report. That includes roughly 274,000 temporary foreign workers, 180,000 asylum seekers and 71,000 international students.
The report found that Quebec accounted for 40 per cent of the total number of asylum seekers in Canada in January, but only 12 per cent of international students. The Quebec government recently passed a bill that allows it to set caps on international students at post-secondary institutions in the province.
The number of temporary immigrants who arrived in Quebec in 2024 dropped considerably from the prior year, when it exceeded 152,000. But the number of new permanent residents increased slightly to 59,500, the majority of whom were economic immigrants. For the first time, the largest number of permanent residents came from Cameroon, followed by France, China, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
Despite the near-record population increase, Quebec’s growth remained lower than that of the rest of Canada in 2024, meaning its demographic weight dropped slightly to 21.9 per cent.
Meanwhile, Quebec’s fertility rate has continued to drop since 2009, reaching a record low of 1.33 children per woman in 2024 – a rate that remains higher than most Canadian provinces, according to the report.
For the first time, deaths are now outnumbering births in the province. The number of new babies has been declining in Quebec for several years, dropping to 77,400 in 2024, while the number of deaths rose to 78,800.
Women are having children later in life, with the average age at first childbirth reaching 30 years in 2024.
Life expectancy in the province was 82.7 years on average, or 84.4 years for women and 80.9 years for men. Those numbers have changed little since 2016, and are higher than in the rest of Canada, according to the report.
The report also found that the number of people leaving Quebec for other provinces is at one of its lowest levels in decades. Only 1,900 people left last year, compared with 7,300 in 2023 and around 14,000 people per year in the 2010s.
The institute projected that the province’s population could reach 10 million around 2054.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 8, 2025.
Maura Forrest, The Canadian Press
