The role immigration plays in the NWT’s population numbers

This month, the latest population data showed the NWT moving past 45,000 people for the first time since records were adjusted in 2023.

The territory’s population stood at a reported 45,074 people as of January 1 this year.

That is a year-on-year increase of 575 people. It represents the first time the NWT’s population has risen by more than 500 people in a calendar year since 2003.

Where did that increase come from?

Over the past year, the NWT Bureau of Statistics reported 483 births and 330 deaths, which means a natural increase (the term for births minus deaths) of 153 people.

That is the territory’s lowest calendar-year figure for natural increase this century so far. To give you some perspective, the natural increase in 2005 was 576 extra people – 727 births and 151 deaths.

Meanwhile, the NWT had a net loss of 202 people to other territories or southern provinces in 2024. Even if you add in the natural increase, you still have a loss of 49 people for the year.

The big driver of 2024’s population growth was international migration, which provided 624 extra people to the NWT last year – the highest that figure has been in the territory’s recent records.

In the above chart, the purple bars show annual births. You can see those bars gradually get smaller. The NWT now welcomes around 250 to 300 fewer babies per year than in the early 2000s.

The orange bars show deaths. The NWT used to lose 160 or 170 residents this way each year. Since 2021, there have been more than 300 deaths each year.

Taken together, the change over time means the NWT is not generating anywhere near the natural population increase it previously had.

Now look at the yellow bars, which show interprovincial migration.

Every year since 2004, more people have left the NWT for the rest of Canada than came the other way. The territory has to fight this annual drain to keep its population stable.

As the natural increase gets lower because of fewer births and more deaths, interprovincial migration has a larger effect.

In 2004, nearly 500 people left the NWT for other parts of Canada but, because there were 724 births and only 162 deaths, the population still grew.

In 2022, more than 800 people left the NWT for other parts of Canada. There were only 502 births, while 312 people passed away. The population fell.

But the population would have fallen much further in 2022 without immigration.

In 2004, immigration added 36 people to the NWT’s population. In 2022, immigration added 328 people to the population.

The past two years for which we have data show the NWT welcoming more than 600 people through international migration each year, without which the population would have dropped.

But the data also shows the NWT’s population change is, to put it bluntly, all over the place.

Some years, the loss to other parts of Canada is small. Other years, it’s huge. And in the past few years, immigration has risen from a fairly stable level between 2015 and 2019 to numbers the NWT has not seen before.

Let’s look at two other charts to give this some perspective.

This is how data for the whole of Canada compares.

Like the NWT, births are gradually going down. Deaths are ticking up. Immigration starts to ramp up in 2015, then increases significantly post-pandemic.

Now look at the Yukon.

In the Yukon, the effect of interprovincial migration each year is usually the opposite to that experienced in the NWT. More people come from the rest of Canada to the Yukon than choose to head the other way.

Immigration starts playing a larger role earlier in the Yukon’s timeline, while the number of births has held steady, in part because the overall population has been growing throughout. (Only once in the period does the Yukon register a decrease.)

Overall, even though there’s still variability, the Yukon chart represents more consistent growth than the NWT.

The population of Whitehorse has grown by more than 8,000 in the past decade and some projections suggest the Yukon could have 60,000 people by 2045. The same projections have the NWT at 47,000 people by that point.

How you interpret all of this depends in part on whether you think a larger NWT population is a good thing, how you view immigration, and what you want from the territory’s economy, its social services, its housing and its businesses.

Despite contrasting fortunes over time, the Yukon has problems of its own with the federal immigration cap and its residents have described a housing crisis not unlike the one in the NWT.

The NWT usually loses a small share of its population to Yukon each year while gaining people from Nunavut.

Here’s a chart showing where the NWT gains and loses people from the rest of Canada.

Of the provinces and territories, Alberta is the biggest drain on the NWT’s population. In most years, hundreds of people decide to head directly south. BC is another destination of choice.

Ontario, on the other hand, is usually responsible for a net increase to the territory’s population each year.

Most other parts of the country have a fairly small impact.

‘We’re talking about people’

Changing approaches to immigration have practical impacts at an economic level and a human level.

As an example, in January, the federal government cut in half the number of people the NWT could accept in a key immigration stream this year.

The same cuts were implemented across Canada as Ottawa appeared to change course, dialling back its approach of recent years and introducing stricter immigration measures. The approach could change again depending on which party wins the current federal election.

The January cuts briefly caused chaos inside the GNWT and continue to cause concern in the territory’s business community.

Business groups argue that accepting just 90 new applicants through the nominee program – designed to help companies hire workers for jobs they couldn’t fill locally – will leave many vacancies and could even force some firms to close.

The same business groups also say they accept that immigration levels have been out of balance for a while.

“They essentially opened the taps as aggressively as you could to address a labour shortfall that was creating a significant economic impact to the country,” said Yellowknife Chamber of Commerce president Mark Henry earlier this month, referring to Ottawa’s approach to immigration post-pandemic.

“There was a lot of discomfort as a result. There was an oversupply, and an oversupply that was somewhat random, not strategic.”

“At the end of the day here we’re talking about people, and this is a very, very emotional subject for people who live in the territory,” NWT minister responsible Caitlin Cleveland said in mid-March, when many nominee program applicants were told they had been unsuccessful.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people who are part of our nominee program are people who are already living in the Northwest Territories,” Cleveland said.

“They’re contributing to our communities, they are friends, they are neighbours, they are northerners. And so this is a very, very difficult time.”