The Quiet Exodus: As Canadians Head for the Exits, Ottawa Isn't Listening

Editor's note: Canada has long seen itself as the country people want to join, but a record number of its own citizens are now leaving. Statistics Canada counted 120,640 emigrants in 2025, the most since records began in 1952, and the pace has not slowed in 2026. Many are young, working-age Canadians settling in American cities, and Prime Minister Mark Carney has treated the trend as a footnote. It deserves far more attention, from Ottawa and from the Americans who will be welcoming these newcomers as neighbors. In a previous post, US-Canada tariff talks were referred to that are meant to destabilize Canada and push it toward annexation, likening this to the interwar "War Plan Red" contingency plan, and adds the claim that Canada is "coming apart" (see Sold to Brussels, Sold on Death: What's Really Happening to Canada) under Mark Carney, with a Quebec separatist government, an Alberta vote, and companies and Canadians leaving.
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The Quiet Exodus: Canada Is Losing Its People, and America Should Take Notice

October 3, 2026

Commentary

A record 120,640 citizens and permanent residents left Canada in 2025, the most since Statistics Canada began keeping the numbers in 1952. In the first quarter of 2026, another 30,092 followed, the highest first-quarter total ever recorded. Only 9,952 returned. The country's population shrank in consecutive quarters. These are not the numbers of a nation that believes in its own future, and they have arrived on Prime Minister Carney's watch.

Ottawa's explanation is that this is a statistical blip, partly the result of deliberate cuts to temporary residents. Sure thing Ottawa, only that is true as far as it goes. Nearly 200,000 non-permanent residents left in a single quarter as the government slashed admissions by roughly 43 percent. But that figure describes visa holders being shown the door. The 30,092 are Canadians and permanent residents who chose to leave, and no immigration policy tweak explains them away.

Who is going, and where

The popular image of the Canadian emigrant is the millionaire fleeing the tax man. The data tells a broader story. Bank of Canada research found roughly 40 percent of Canadians who would rank in the top 1 percent of earners now live in the United States, along with 30 to 50 percent of the next nine percentiles. But this time the wealthy are only part of it. About two-thirds of emigrants are between 20 and 44, the prime working and family-building years. Ontario produced 47 percent of departures in the first three quarters of 2025 while holding about 39 percent of the population. Quebec's emigration hit its highest level since 2017.

Most of them go south. Of the 1.3 million Canadian-born people living abroad, 793,897, or 61.4 percent, live in the United States. The United Kingdom (7.8 percent) and Australia (4.6 percent) trail far behind. A May 2026 TD Economics report titled "Canada's Silent Brain Drain" found that most of the educated young professionals leaving also head to the US.

What the leavers say

Here the record needs care. No survey could find measures how many Canadians leave because of politics itself. Surveys and government data point mainly to housing costs, a strained job market, high taxes and weak opportunity for entrepreneurs. Those who leave permanently often describe the decision as less about politics and more about predictability.

That distinction is the heart of the indictment. Housing, taxes, regulation and growth are not acts of nature. They are the work product of governments, and a government that presides over a record exodus of the young and skilled owns the result. Good job, Ottawa, such a bright future for Canada's youth while the sick and mentally ill get euthanized. Canadians are not leaving a nation in crisis so much as a state that has stopped giving them reasons to stay.

Alberta

Nowhere is that more visible than Alberta. Premier Danielle Smith has added a remain-or-separate question to the ballot for the October 19 referendum. Recent polls suggest most Albertans would vote to stay, with the "remain" side leading by roughly 40 points in the latest Ipsos survey, but a referendum that serious would not be on the calendar at all if the federal government had earned Western trust. Tensions of this kind, between a province and the capital that governs it, cannot be allowed to fester on America's northern border. Whatever the outcome, a country that has to ask whether one of its richest provinces wants to leave has already lost something.

Albertans are not packing their bags, and the reason is leverage as much as loyalty. The province sits on some of the largest energy reserves in the world, and many Albertans believe Ottawa has spent years taxing, regulating and constraining the industry that pays a large share of the country's bills. That resentment is real. In a February Angus Reid poll, 41 percent of UCP voters leaned toward leaving Canada and 16 percent said they would definitely vote to go. But Albertans also know what they have: a strong economy, a young workforce, abundant resources and a government willing to push back. For most of them, the better answer to a distant federal government is to stay home, use that strength and demand a better deal. The same poll found that most Albertans would vote to remain in Canada, citing the economic risks of independence and a strong Canadian identity. The message to Ottawa is conditional: Alberta has stayed so far, but a Canadian government that keeps treating the province as a source of revenue rather than a partner should not count on that patience lasting. 

The cost if this continues

If this migration continues, Canada faces a tax drain and a brain drain at once. The tax drain follows from who is leaving. When a large share of the highest earners leaves, the income tax base that funds health care, pensions and infrastructure narrows, and the burden shifts onto those who remain, which gives the next wave of professionals one more reason to go. The brain drain compounds it. Doctors, engineers, founders and researchers trained at Canadian public expense take that investment to American employers, where it produces American growth. Economists have warned that selective emigration of high-ability workers to the US helps explain Canada's persistent gaps in productivity and GDP per adult. A country cannot subsidize the education of its talent, export that talent, and then wonder why its economy stalls. Carney, a former central banker at the BoE who promised economic competence, has so far offered very little beyond managing the decline.

What Americans owe their neighbors

Americans should not look at this as a distant story. These are our closest allies, culturally and economically woven into our own communities. The Canadians arriving in our cities and workplaces are skilled, educated and ready to contribute. Americans should welcome them, back employers and communities that help them settle, and press Washington to keep pathways like the TN visa under USMCA open and workable. We should also push our own leaders to treat stability in Canada, including the question of Alberta's place in the federation, as a matter of continental interest rather than someone else's problem.

A nation's leaders are judged by whether their people choose to stay. By that measure, Canada's government has a great deal to answer for.

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Editor's note: Euthanasia, which Canada calls "Medical Assistance in Dying", is the deliberate ending of a patient's life by a physician, and its critics argue it should be halted because it has expanded to people who are not dying, some of whom cite poverty and inadequate support, before more vulnerable Canadians are lost to it:

Medical Assistance Dying In Canada 

The Toronto Sun published an article which demonstrates that Canada's wall of oppressive Covid pandemic authoritarianism is beginning to come down:

Toronto Sun calls for those who approved and advanced harmful covid vaccines to be fired and prosecuted

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