Growing up

Statscan released their latest census results yesterday which had some interesting tidbits in it. Canada's population grew 5.4% from 2001 to 2006 which was the highest growth rate in the G8 and now puts our population at 31.6 million. What was interesting was that 2/3 of the growth was fulled by immigrants and it's predicted that by 2030 all the population growth will come from immigrants. Most of the growth is occurring around big cities which isn't much of a surprise, not to many immigrants can afford 400k condos in the city which seems to be the only thing up for sale.

Another interesting stat was that the city of Barrie grew 19.2% to almost 180k people. No wonder the cottage (which is 15kms from Barrie) no longer feels like the great outdoors like it used to.

Canada is often held as an example of a country that is built on immigrants and can successfully absorb so many without a lot of the political and ethnic tensions that others experience. Sure we have our problem, PHD's driving cabs isn't good, but a lot of countries (cough, cough, Estonia) could learn a couple of lessons about growing their countries with immigrants.