This article is very confusing, and looks like an 'I've got to write 2,000 words for Friday' piece.
It's throwing in all sorts of 'data' as if they're equivalent. The first data mentioned is about BC getting 34,000 more people through net interprovincial migration. It isn't made clear, but that's the migration data for the 2nd Quarter of 2021, reported by StatsCan on 29th September. Ontario lost a lot of people, Alberta lost some too, BC gained the most. More details
here.
It then says "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." That's not for the same period. The last
dataset was released in January this year, and the 'Nanaimo' references the Regional District (with 156,000 population) not the City of Nanaimo with 90,000. So Doug's math is off in calculating the relative net growth. The equivalent (2016 census) population for Vancouver was 2.46m. Both would be higher now, but there's no 2021 census data until next year.
The data for the past several years shows about 1,000 net interprovincial migration to Nanaimo, and about 4,000 to Greater Vancouver. It doesn't tell you anything about how many people actually moved to either location, because it's a net number. It seems reasonable to think quite a few of the people who move to Nanaimo move there to retire, and some of those will be from other provinces. That's supported by the death rates - 16,357 deaths were recorded in Greater Vancouver 2019-20 and 1,827 in Nanaimo - almost double the death rate of Vancouver.
So the story overall isn't completely wrong - there's a net gain of people to Nanaimo from other provinces at a greater rate than to Greater Vancouver. Is that significant? Possibly only if your job depends on filling a column with confusing statistics and quotes from an available politician before deadline.
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