Statistics Canada released population statistics for the first three months of the year last week. The headline announced “Almost no increase in the population size of Canada during the first quarter of 2025.” That downbeat message didn’t appear to set off any alarm bells at Halifax city hall. Down there the talk was all about major growth as city staff laid out plans to accommodate over a million residents by 2050.
Their presentation is of the same ilk as Tim Houston’s musings about doubling Nova Scotia’s population by 2060, and deserves to be scrutinized with the same skepticism.
As discussed here and here, Nova Scotia’s population boom is over for now and Statistics Canada doesn’t see it resuming anytime soon. It would seem therefore to follow logically that Halifax’s growth would also be at least somewhat constrained. But when it comes to growth, rationality is in short supply.
Looking first at Nova Scotia as a whole, Statcan’s most recent population projections – published last June – put a damper on Houston’s growth aspirations.The most bullish of the agency’s six scenarios projected a Nova Scotia population of 1,468,900 by 2048, representing annual average increase well below the rate that would be required to reach Houston’s 2060 goal of two million.
Statcan hasn’t published any similar long-term projections for Halifax, but city planners produced four different scenarios of their own, all of which seem to ignore Statistics Canada while embracing Houston’s unrealistic growth designs.
The planners’ most sensational scenario, based on high immigration and an economic boom, leads to a population of 1,165,311 for Halifax by 2050. That’s an increase of more than 660,000 by 2050 – and almost twice the 392,000 increase for the province as a whole in Statcan’s high-end projection – i.e. 1,468,900 by 2048.
So unless Statcan projections grossly underestimate provincial growth, realization of Halifax planners’ big growth scenario for HRM would mean the rest of Nova Scotia (RONS) losing nearly half its population. Statcan’s 1,468,900 minus the planners’ 1,165,311 leaves only 303,589 in RONS, a 47 percent reduction from the 575,000 Nova Scotians who lived outside HRM on July 1, 2024. Such depopulation is not a likely scenario, despite the current government threatening quiet country living with its focus on mining, fracking and wind turbines everywhere.
“Low growth” scenario
Even the most modest of the city planners’ four scenarios – a population of 730,862 by 2050 assuming low immigration and an economic downturn – doesn’t look like a sure thing.
Last July 1, the population of the Halifax Economic Region (as opposed to the Census Metropolitan Area which includes East Hants) was 503,037. Reaching 730,862 by 2050 means adding 277,825 over 26 years, an average of 10,685 per year.
That looks feasible if you look only at the years since 2018-19, when annual average growth was even higher than that – 12,680 over those six years. However, that average was inflated by several years of unusual events:
- over 10,000 more people came to Halifax from other Canadian provinces than moved to another province between 2020 and 2022;
- net non-permanent residents – mostly international students and temporary foreign workers – totalled nearly 7,500 in 2022-3, about five times the usual number.
Both of those trends came to an abrupt halt in the 12 months ending June 30, 2024, as the table below reveals.
Components of population change, Halifax Economic Region
| 2021-22 | 2022-23 | 2023-24 | |
| Births less Deaths | 455 | -261 | -322 |
| Net immigration | 10,555 | 9,468 | 9,935 |
| Interprovincial migration | 5,202 | 2191 | -419 |
| Intraprovincial migration | -291 | -411 | -590 |
| Net non-permanent | 596 | 7,470 | 2,996 |
| Total Increase | 16,517 | 18,457 | 11,600 |
Source: Statistics Canada Table 17-10-0151-01
As the table shows, the number of temporary immigrants dropped by nearly 4,500, from 7,470 in 2022-23 to 2,996 in 2023-24. In addition, 419 more people left Halifax and moved to another province in 2023-24 than moved to the city from elsewhere in Canada – a sharp contrast to 2021-22 when the number was 5,202 in the city’s favour.
The negative interprovincial migration, the first for Halifax in ten years, was notable for the fact that it occurred even as the rest of the province had a net gain of 2,600 people through interprovincial migration in 2023-24.
More negatives
The table shows two other developments that, if the start of a trend, cast more doubt on whether even the low 730,862 is a likely prospect. Births minus deaths, also known as natural increase, was negative for both 2022-23 and 2023-24. Negative natural increase, with deaths exceeding births, has for years been the norm for Nova Scotia as a whole. But until 2022-23, and going back to 2000-01, Halifax always recorded more births than deaths. Indeed, between 2013 and 2022 natural increase averaged 750 a year. Was 2022-23 and 2023-24 a blip or a trend?
Another source of population growth for Halifax, intra-provincial migration, has also turned negative over the last three years. As recently as four years ago over 1,000 more people per year moved to HRM from the Rest Of Nova Scotia than went the other way. Now a growing number – a net of 590 in 2023-24 – are choosing the RONS. Blip or trend?
With natural increase and both inter- and intra- provincial migration in negative territory, the only source of population growth for HRM in 2023-24 was immigration. The federal government controls that flow, and has reduced the numbers for both permanent and temporary immigrants for this year and next. So an increase in either category is unlikely in the short term and up to the feds longer term.
Looking at this year
Detailed components of Halifax population growth for 2025 won’t be published by Statistics Canada until early 2026. However, based on the latest provincial level data, it’s doubtful there will be a turnaround from the downward trends observed in 2023-24.
The latest quarterly statistics, covering the nine-month period between July 1, 2024 and March 31, 2025, show that Nova Scotia’s population has gone from 1,076,374 to 1,080,418, an increase of only 4,044. On June 26, four days before the end of the 2024-25 population year, Statistics Canada’s real time population clock had the province’s population at 1,082,697, an increase for the year – less four days – of only 6,323.
That modest increase – down almost 70 percent from the 2023-24 provincial population gain – will be mainly the result of permanent immigrants. Based on past experience, most of those new immigrants will settle in Halifax but that will not be nearly enough to get back to the growth that happened between 2018-19 and 2023-24.
I suppose there’s nothing wrong with planning for a 2050 Halifax population ranging from 730,000 to 1,165,000. Although recent data suggests otherwise, either of those dreams could come true. Anything’s possible. But in the meantime, planners should ensure their facts are up to date, lest they add to the gold rush mentality driving development in HRM.
Over the past four years we have seen how the Houston government has used a couple years of unprecedented growth (and loose talk about doubling the population) to justify seizing power over development decisions in HRM. They are using that power to, among other transgressions, push suburban sprawl onto1,800 acres of wilderness adjacent to Sandy Lake provincial park in the development-stressed Bedford-Hammonds Plains area. Destructive schemes like that would be even harder to justify without the continual boosterism about population growth.
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