Douglas Todd: People are moving from other provinces to B.C., but avoiding Metro Van

[Sheba]

“We have had lots of people from Alberta and the East cashing out and moving to Nanaimo — to get away from the crush and the smoke,” says Leonard Krog, mayor of the growing Vancouver Island city.

During the pandemic, which is changing many Canadians’ housing needs, Nanaimo and other smaller B.C. towns, such as Comox as well as Kamloops and Penticton, are seeing an upsurge of arrivals from across the country.

“House prices are rising up and down Vancouver Island,” said Krog.

A recent Statistics Canada report showed that B.C. received more inter-provincial migrants than any other province between 2020 and 2021.

B.C.’s net inter-provincial growth, which captures the number of people who arrived compared to those who left, stood at 34,000 during this COVID period. That compares to 27,000 in 2016, and 16,000 in 2019.

But only a small portion of newcomers to B.C. from other provinces typically move to Metro Vancouver.

Indeed, in addition, about 12,000 more people a year have been moving out of Metro Vancouver for other parts of B.C. than have been moving into the metropolis from within the province.

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While Metro Vancouver’s real-estate industry often points to inter-provincial migration to explain why housing prices are skyrocketing, the reality is people from other provinces typically only account for about 15 per cent of the metropolis’s growth .

The vast majority of new arrivals into Metro Vancouver are foreign-born immigrants. The rate of new permanent residents to Metro is normally about 36,000 annually, but that total went down in the past year due to pandemic border restrictions.

Recent Statistics Canada data shows the city of Nanaimo, population 90,000, is on a per-capita basis absorbing 13 times more new people from other provinces than Metro Vancouver, population 2.5 million.

In addition, a solid portion of the thousands who each year say goodbye to Metro Vancouver are ending up in Nanaimo, which is growing by about 1,600 people annually from what StatsCan calls “intra-provincial migration.”

Greater Victoria, unlike Metro Vancouver, is also expanding from absorbing people from within the province. And despite being much smaller, it normally takes in as many people from across Canada as B.C.’s largest city.

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