Toronto Lags Behind North American Peers in Population Growth
Toronto’s shrinking population has pushed rental vacancies higher, worsened the collapsing condo market and threatens to blow an even wider hole in the city’s finances.
It’s also plunged Toronto to near the bottom of a ranking of the fastest-growing cities in Canada and the United States only one year after holding the top spot, according to an analysis of population data from the two countries by Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Urban Research and Land Development.
Earlier this year, Statistics Canada reported the population of the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area – which covers the City of Toronto and surrounding municipalities – shrank by roughly 1,000 people in the 12 months leading up to July 1, 2025, marking the first decline on record for the region outside of the pandemic.
That was a sharp reversal from a nearly 270,000-person increase the previous year, enough to knock Toronto from first place to 412th in the TMU researchers’ annual analysis of 435 metropolitan areas in Canada and the U.S. Among Canadian cities, only Calgary and Edmonton made the Top 10 list, which included slowdowns in population growth across the board compared to 2024.
While Canada’s clampdown on temporary foreign workers and international students is partly behind Toronto’s decline, it’s far from the whole story.
The researchers – Diana Petramala, a senior economist at TMU, and senior research fellow Frank Clayton – found Toronto still had one of the highest levels of net international migration among the fastest-growing cities, adding 53,000 people that way.
But that was down 84 per cent from the year before, and that immigration slowdown exposed a chronic problem Toronto has faced over the last decade: an exodus of people to other parts of Ontario and Canada, many feeling priced out by city’s housing market. Toronto lost roughly 77,500 more people than it gained through domestic migration in 2025.
“The city’s rank among other North American cities reflects sharp trends in out-migration of its existing population,” the researchers wrote. “Increasingly unaffordable housing appears to be pushing many residents to other parts of Canada.
This article was first reported by The Globe and Mail
