VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Canada had an unusually large population gain from January to March, much of it due to people escaping the civil war in Syria.
Statistics Canada says new immigrants totaled 86,000, “a large number of whom were Syrian refugees.” It says the nation “has never received this number of immigrants in a single quarter” since the current method of accounting for them was introduced in 1971.
Preliminary figures show Canada’s population was 36.2 million on April 1st, up 107,000 from the previous quarter. The agency says it was the largest first-quarter gain since 1989.