Many newcomers to Canada in the past year set up residence in one of the nation’s 41 census metropolitan areas, which contain populations greater than 100,000 individuals. As was noted in previous years, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver were the most welcoming cities for recent immigrants in 2021. While most recent immigrants chose to live in Canada’s three largest metropolitan areas, that number has slowly decreased over the last few years. In 2016, 56 percent of all new arrivals settled in one of these cities. But by 2021, that number had decreased to 53.4 percent. The drop was most notable in Montreal, where the share fell from 14.8 percent to just 12.2 percent over these five years.
