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What Inter-Provincial Migration Trends Can Tell Us About Good Governance

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It turns out we move a great deal less than our American neighbors

Government policies have consequences. Among them is the possibility that they might so annoy the locals that people actually get up and head for the exit. Given how parting can be such sweet sorrow (and how it’s a pain to lose out on all that revenue from provincial income, property, and sales tax), legislatures generally prefer to keep their citizens on this side of the door.

Nevertheless, migration happens. And when enough people do it at the same time, they sometimes leave economic and social clues behind waiting to be discovered. This graph represents net migrations since 1971 into and out of the four largest provinces:

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It may just be possible to make out some broad patterns here. Quebec has never had a net inbound migration year (although there’s been plenty of immigration to Quebec from outside of Canada). But nothing matches the mass exodus of anglophones due to concerns over language and separation in the 1970s.

Curiously it seems that Alberta and British Columbia received far more migrants than Ontario around that time – although the actual numbers tell us that they were more likely to have come from Saskatchewan and Ontario than Quebec. By contrast, most disillusioned Quebecers found their way to Ontario. Besides the 70s, Alberta also enjoyed inbound spikes in the mid-90s, mid-00s, and early 10s. And it looks like they’re in the middle of another boom cycle as we speak.

The real value of all this data however, is in using it to test causation hypotheses. In other words, can statistical analysis tell us what it was that caused the migrations? And are some or all of those causes the result of government policy choices? Here are some possibilities we’ll explore:

  • Household income trends
  • Government debt
  • Crime rates
  • Healthcare costs
  • Housing costs

Right off the top I’ll come clean with you: there’ll be no smoking gun here. I could find no single historical measure that came close to explaining migration patterns. However I was able to confidently discard some theories. That’s a win I guess. And other numbers did hint to intriguing possibilities.

Inter-provincial variations in household income, crime rates (specifically murder rates), healthcare costs (including prescriptions, eye care, and dental care), and even housing affordability had no measurable impact on migration. This was true for both correlation coefficients and lag analysis (where we looked at migration changes in the years following an economic event).

Rising unemployment had, at best, a minimal impact on outbound migration. And even then, it was only noticeable for Alberta and Prince Edward Island.

Of all the metrics I explored, the only one that might have had a serious influence in migration was provincial government budget deficits.

Folks from Alberta, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland all responded to growing government debt by clearing out. Now, I doubt this was their way to telling the government what they really thought about bad fiscal management. Rather, people probably decided to move to greener pastures in response to the ripple-effect consequences of deficits, like higher taxes, reduced social services, and deteriorating infrastructure.


I suspect that part of the reason I wasn’t able to find any strong connections between those metrics and migration patterns is because there really isn’t all that much migration going on in the first place.

Take Ontario’s record net population loss of 31,018 residents back in 2021. That may sound like a lot of people, but it’s actually just a hair over two-tenths of one percent of the total Ontario population. And even Quebec’s epic 1979 loss of 46,429 people was still nowhere near one percent. It was 0.7117456, to be precise. Those aren’t significant numbers.

When so few people choose to move, it’s probably because there’s nothing on the macro level going on that’s pushing them. Those who do go, probably do it primarily for personal reasons that just won’t show up in population-scale data.

There’s also the very real possibility that Canadians are smart enough to realize that things probably won’t be any better over there than they already are right here. Fewer than two-thirds of one percent of Ontarians left for other provinces in 2023, while only around one-third of a percent gave up on Quebec.

By contrast, annual state-to-state migration figures in the U.S. typically range between 1 percent to 5 percent of each state’s population. In 2022, that added up to 8.2 million people, according to the Census Bureau.

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PBO report shows cost of bureaucracy up 73 per cent under Trudeau

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From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

By Franco Terrazzano

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling on the federal government to rein in the bureaucracy following today’s Parliamentary Budget Officer report showing the bureaucracy costs taxpayers $69.5 billion.

“The cost of the federal bureaucracy increased by 73 per cent since 2016, but it’s a good bet most Canadians aren’t seeing anywhere close to 73 per cent better services from the government,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Taxpayers are getting soaked because the size and cost of the federal bureaucracy is out of control.”

Today’s PBO report estimates the federal bureaucracy cost taxpayers $69.5 billion in 2023-24. In 2016-17, the cost of the bureaucracy was $40.2 billion. That’s an increase of 72.9 per cent.

The most recent data shows the cost continues to rise quickly.

“Spending on personnel in the first five months of 2024-25 is up 8.0 per cent over the same period last year,” according to the PBO.

“I have noticed a marked increase in the number of public servants since 2016 and a proportional increase in spending,” said Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux. “But we haven’t seen similar improvements when it comes to service.”

The Trudeau government added 108,793 bureaucrats since 2016 – a 42 per cent increase. Canada’s population grew by 14 per cent during the same period. Had the bureaucracy only increased with population growth, there would be 72,491 fewer federal employees today.

The government awarded more than one million pay raises to bureaucrats in the last four years, according to access-to-information records obtained by the CTF. The government also rubberstamped $406 million in bonuses last year.

“The government added tens of thousands of extra bureaucrats, rubberstamped hundreds of millions in bonuses and awarded more than one million pay raises and all taxpayers seem to get out of it is higher taxes and more debt,” Terrazzano said. “For the government to balance the budget and provide tax relief, it will need to cut the size and cost of Ottawa’s bloated bureaucracy.”

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Can’t afford Rent? Groceries for your kids? Trudeau says suck it up and pay the tax!

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Watch Canada’s Prime Minister tell an anti-poverty group, your ability to buy “groceries for my kids” is less important than sacrificing to pay his carbon tax.

In case you still thought there might be even the tiniest chance Justin Trudeau might come around.. well this settles it. He is as they say, ‘beyond the pale’.

Sure we’ve pieced this together over the last number of years, but it’s still SHOCKING to see him say it directly, proclaim it proudly. This week Trudeau received applause from an audience of the intellectually suffering at something called the “Global Citizen Now” panel discussion on the sidelines of the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Rio.

Much appreciation for the first short video below to Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre who shared his ferocious reaction to Trudeau’s anti-human comments, challenging the current PM to call an immediate election.

Or course there will be no quick election call. To Justin, it’s more important to cling to the undercarriage of a taxpayer funded jet so he can fly the globe stunning audiences unfortunately already stunned by their utter terror of losing the planet.

In their horror at their inability to turn the switch off and let us all freeze/starve to death this winter, they applaud lovingly for their intellectual leader/sock model as he describes how hard it is to convince angry, hungry people they really need to suck it up.

If only he read a history book.. any history book.. apologies, any book at all. Truly even spending some time with the literary version of an Al Gore video rant would at lest keep JT occupied so he couldn’t speak for a few moments. I’m pretty sure every time he opens his mouth, the temperature in Canada rises as millions of frustrated hotheads (hello there) explode, spewing steam high up into the upper atmosphere where water particles do much more damage to our planet than the final exhaling of a non grocery-eating-planet-loving-Canadian.

Watch Pierre Poilievre’s video and assuage the ensuing headache by mapping out your route to a polling booth. If this doesn’t sell a couple of those ‘Axe the Tax’ shirts for the Poilievre team, well.. enjoy your stroll to the foodbank.

Here’s a link to his entire discussion. If you have a strong stomach and 20 minutes of your life to donate to a higher cause… No silly, not the intended cause of the anti-poverty group… But to the intellectual cause of understanding just how twisted the logic has become for those who fly around the world to wine and dine, only to break long enough to tell us they think it’s perfectly fine if we can’t buy groceries for our kids.

By the way, please save a bit of your shock and disappointment for the hapless host of the ‘anti-poverty’ Global Citizen. This was apparently on the sidelines of a G20 Summit.  I would expect this drivel to be called out at a respectable middle school debate. Apparently the ‘anti-poverty’ Global Citizen people aren’t overly concerned with poverty. Do we need to say that not being able to afford groceries is in fact THE definition of poverty?  Or course not. It would be much easier for them to change their name to Former Global Citizens.

You were warned.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sits down for a conversation with Michael Scheldrick, co-founder of the anti-poverty group Global Citizen, on the sidelines of the G20 Leaders’ Summit Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

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