With COVID-19 disrupting travel, shutting borders, and redefining what is essential work, Pandemic Borders explores what international migration will look like after the pandemic, in this series titled #MigrantFutures
Thanks to remote work and overall changes in the way firms organize their (virtual) offices, smaller Canadian cities are becoming a pole of attraction for all, including for newcomers. But city planners must put in place, early on, the necessary policies to seize this opportunity.
Just before COVID-19 negatively impacted global mobility, Canada had increased its annual intake of immigrants to about 300,000. Most immigrants to the country tend to settle in the larger cities like Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. But, since the turn of the century, a gradual shift in this distribution towards medium- and smaller-sized cities had begun to take place, due to the introduction of policies, programs and initiatives designed to attract and retain newcomers outside of the major cities. COVID-19 has had a negative effect on these population trends (Chart 1 below), and the long-term impact of the pandemic will create new challenges for new migrants.
