A thoughtful approach to immigration has been a historical strength of Canadian economic policy. The recent post-COVID-19 immigration surge has created a number of well-known challenges, however, as slow-moving housing markets and social services systems adjust to the sudden rise in the country’s population.
But another, seemingly more basic, problem has arisen for policymakers and analysts alike: Canada’s population has become increasingly difficult to count, and the balance of evidence points toward an undercount of one million temporary residents in the country’s main employment survey. This has eroded the reliability of a host of market-relevant variables involving population counts, from employment figures to housing construction to productivity.
