Winnipeg or Québec - 1 Million
 

Who do you think will reach the one million mark first? and why?

Probably Winnipeg. It's been growing faster. But I'm rooting for Quebec City!

Winnipeg. Why? Some people might not like this, but Quebec's hardened language laws and questionable secular bill will slow down immigration, both international and domestic.

Winnipeg has been growing by about 1% a year where as QC is at 0.72 a year. Also Winnipeg attracts 62% of the 33,000 new arrivals to Manitoba. Quebec with their language laws and immigration quotas and Montreal being the preferred location for most newcomers dilutes Quebecs chances.

Winnipeg - the city is much more open, welcoming and inclusive and much less ethnocentric than QC. Winnipeg also doesn't have to worry about overly restrictive and suffocating linguistic restrictions.

QC is a wonderful city BTW. I like it a lot. It is just an outlier in the North American context, and is hamstrung by an ethnocentric provincial government.

I'm rooting for Winnipeg too (MB homer living in QC) but Québec City is no slouch. I think they will be very close when it comes to the million mark.

I think we may be underestimating the attractiveness of the hardened language laws for the non woke French (pffft! two genders) language. There's alot of French speakers on this smooshed ball open to a move. It's not very likely Winnipeg is going to steal more away from the Asian immigration juggernaut or is it currently on the radar for future Toronto expats.

On a serious note, i don't care. I'm more interested in Acajack's interest in this thread. Apparently, I'm too early.

Where is he? Has he been succumbed by the smoke?

I'm going with Winnipeg because it has more affordable grey stucco shit boxes sprouting all around the outskirts, immigrants from the Philippines, India and Ukraine. I'd prefer QC to grow in the future, when this grey aesthetic is no longer in fashion.

Although not considered one city, Kitchener Waterloo Cambridge could easily beat both cities to 1 million in Waterloo Region.

Yeah that is just Outer Toronto. Not included.

Winnipeg at a million would have been hard to imagine 25 years ago. Yet here we are on the cusp of it. You wouldn't really know it from the infrastructure decisions that get made here though, ha.

Winnipeg is a landing pad for people from abroad and rural/northern locales in the region. I don't get the impression that there is a ton of natural population growth and as we know, Winnipeg is not the most popular destination for interprovincial migrants.

However, I don't have a grasp on what is driving population growth in Quebec City. Where are people moving there from?

Winnipeg, obviously.

Also: to say that Quebec City's population growth will be penalized because of the new language policies is to completely misunderstand Quebec City's demographics, and its history in general.

Incoming civil servants from around the province. Students going to Laval. Economic refugees from the Saguenay, Bas St-Laurent & Gaspe.

Not really. QC would not be attractive to 95% of the people thinking of immigrating to Canada because it is nearly 100% francophone. This is exacerbated by the new language laws stipulating that they must learn French within six months or GTFO.

Of course, Haitian refugees and economic migrants from sub Saharan French Africa might consider QC, but Montreal is larger, and has a much better established and multicultural diaspora. Most of these people would settle there.

Winnipeg used to be 580,000 for many years throughout my youth and collecting provincial highway maps.

I'm going to have to vote for Winnipeg for obvious reasons, but a quick look at the components of growth and Winnipeg has a strong advantage over Quebec for international migration (16,000/yr versus 6,000/yr for Quebec), but a massive disadvantage over inter-provincial migration (-7,000/yr versus ~0 for Quebec).

Winnipeg has much larger population growth AND population loss compared to Quebec, so it's difficult to say if the large population influx into Winnipeg will continue to be significantly larger than the population outflux over the long term. I get the sense that the more people that move to Winnipeg, the higher the outmigration rate several years later due to it being a "landing pad" for immigrants, poor state of infrastructure, or dissatisfaction with the weather.

While Winnipeg's own population projection puts the population at exceeding 1 million 25 years from now, it's difficult to say if Winnipeg's "big numbers in, big numbers out" growth will be make it the winner over Quebec's "slow and steady" growth.

Winnipeg and Québec have always been slow and steady growth in the past. I am wondering which city will accelerate it.

I think as far as KWC is concerned, it is growing fast but there is still too much ground to make up. Now, if Guelph started being counted as part of it (I have a suspicion that the Quad-Cities/RM of Grand River/KWCG isn’t too far away once HWY 7 is constructed and more transit connections are made between the two), it would still be smaller than Hamilton (based on 2021 data at least) but there would be less ground to cover.

Winnipeg is the obvious choice as the first to 1M for all above-noted reasons. I suspect Quebec City will start to grow faster once the LRT is built out, but I don’t think it can outpace Winnipeg fast enough.

If you look at the broader KWCG region I think it will most definitely be at a million people in the next 20 years, largely due to the GTA spillover.

2022 population was 794,897 people.

2002 population was 586,018 people.

(Source)

The distance between the urban boundaries of the 2 CMAs is only 6km, and this will likely shrink.

https://i.ibb.co/txrz1F6/KWCG.jpg

If an immigrant is considering living in Quebe city, langage laws are irrelevant, since the city is 100% francophone. It’s la CAQ immigration policies that limit the number of immigrants to the province, which could easily find ten of thousands more immigrants willing to come here if they would open the gate, language laws or not.