Statscan numbers

[Surrealplaces]

October Housing starts are out, with Calgary's at the top of the list (4th time this year). In the other metros, Montreal having a strong showing, but the rest kind of sluggish numbers, especially Toronto which kind of surprised me. Ottawa Gatineau still sluggish, but up from last month.

City	SFH	semi	row	apartment	total
Calgary	545	192	353	1968	3058
Montreal	161	36	81	2564	2842
Vancouver	244	128	135	1121	1628
Edmonton	526	116	108	611	1505
Toronto	327	2	277	839	1445
Ott/Gat	201	68	190	453	910

 

[Albertasaurus]

Wow, Toronto's housing starts have fallen off a cliff!

 

[Surrealplaces]

Toronto has a ton load of residential towers still u/c, so I'm guessing the numbers will be on the slow side for a while

 

[trtcttc]

Toronto has a ton load of residential towers still u/c, so I'm guessing the numbers will be on the slow side for a while

And the economics doesn't work currently, developers can't recoup their land + construction costs with the current condo market.

 

[Cowtown]

Calgary’s had strong housing starts for a few years now. I’m really curious to see what the numbers look like in the 2026 census after things settle down. The big three metros had a huge percentage of temporary foreign workers, like around 90% as the main driver of their growth the past two years.
Calgary was around 44%, plus Calgary has had good numbers from interprovincial migration.

 

[trtcttc]

Calgary’s had strong housing starts for a few years now. I’m really curious to see what the numbers look like in the 2026 census after things settle down. The big three metros had a huge percentage of temporary foreign workers, like around 90% as the main driver of their growth the past two years.
Calgary was around 44%, plus Calgary has had good numbers from interprovincial migration.

Inter-provincial migration was the talk of the town, but in reality the majority of growth was international. Interprovincial just went from 0 or negative to something similar to the early 2010s. While I'm not sure where the data is, but the make up is probably different. The earlier inter-provincial increase were likely O&G related young workers, whereas this wave was more families, and more durable migration. This is probably the first AB migration wave not directly tied to oil prices

The NPRs (asylum, study, work, etc.) more than doubled form 2023 to 2025, representing about 160,000 new residents. That's flatlined this year, and potentially decreasing. Our NPRs are about 5% of our population, whereas in Ontario, it's about 8.5%, and BC, about 8.8%.

 

[Surrealplaces]

And a few more stats relating to the percentage of non-permanent residents in the growth numbers.

Looking at the big 6 metros, it looks like Cgy/Edm/Ott are in a similar situation with around 44% of the growth coming from non-permanent residents.
The big 3 are interesting with Montreal being as high as 90% of the growth coming from non-perm residents. Tor and Van are also up there.

Mtl 90%
Van 80%
Tor 79%
Cgy 44%
Edm 43%
Ott 43 %

I wonder if this explains Montreal's strong population growth while having low housing starts over the past two years?

Calgary’s had strong housing starts for a few years now. I’m really curious to see what the numbers look like in the 2026 census after things settle down. The big three metros had a huge percentage of temporary foreign workers, like around 90% as the main driver of their growth the past two years.
Calgary was around 44%, plus Calgary has had good numbers from interprovincial migration.

Lots of NPR's for the big 3 metros, at least from July 2023- July 2024. I don't have stats for previous years, but I suspect the previous year will be similar for the big three. As trtttc mentioned, interprovincial migration was good, but most of the growth was still from international immigration.
What I am expecting to see is a slow down of all major metros, including Calgary, but Calgary's slowdown won't be as pronounced as some of the others.

There's talk that some cities might actually lose population. I guess we'll see.