We pretty much added another city to Saskatchewan in the third quarter of this year.
The latest quarterly population estimates have pegged the number of people living in Saskatchewan at just a touch under 1.25 million. That’s up roughly 7,000 from the previous quarter which is consistent with numbers we’ve been seeing for the past year or two.
Given that it takes 5,000 to achieve ‘city status’ in this province, adding nearly 7,000 new citizens is the equivalent of adding another city in a three-month window.
Nearly all of the net increase can be attributed to international immigration, something that will likely be slowing in the future as Ottawa tightens rules in this area. But we are also seeing a lot of internal movement.
Saskatchewan gained roughly one thousand new residents from each of BC and Ontario and nearly 1,500 from Alberta in this three-month period. But we also lost 2,300 to Alberta, 800 to BC, more than a thousand to Ontario and a few hundred to Manitoba in the same timeframe.
