PEI still struggles to keep newcomers
Immigrant retention needs to be part of the new population strategy
Apart from Alberta, Prince Edward Island is Canada’s fastest-growing province. In the last year, the population grew by a whopping 4 per cent — largely due to interprovincial migrants, immigrants, and non-permanent residents such as temporary workers, international students, and their families.
I have written a few times now on the opportunities and challenges that PEI faces due to rapid growth (especially in the context of housing), but I have not really discussed how those shortcomings often reinforce one burning demographic issue in particular: PEI is good at getting newcomers to move here, but bad at helping them stay here.
We can find out how good or bad a province is at keeping newcomers by looking at retention rates, or the share of immigrants who opted not to move between provinces within the first few years of their admission to Canada. This can be determined by looking at immigrant taxfiler data, which shows the provincial residency status of newcomers who landed in Canada as far back as 2007. While some immigrants move to another province or territory within the first few months of their arrival to Canada, an immigrant is considered a “recent” arrival if they were admitted within the five previous years. As a result, tracking five-year retention rates of immigrants throughout a decade shows whether more or fewer people are leaving a region.
From this approach, we can see that PEI has the lowest immigrant retention rate in the country. Although PEI’s rate appears to be improving, it remains far below the national standard.
As the provincial government puts the ‘final touches’ on a new population growth strategy, officials must ask why the province has performed so poorly in immigrant retention. The answer may lie in a combination of access to housing, the availability of social supports, and the design of local immigration programs.
The Century Initiative, a charity which aims to see Canada’s population reach 100 million by 2100, states that “employment opportunities, settlement services and connections to social networks are among the key contributing factors to where immigrants choose to settle [and that] access to housing, public transportation, childcare and education are also important considerations.”
For a place like PEI, access to housing and transportation are among the province’s biggest vulnerabilities to retention. The province has the lowest rental vacancy rate in the country and has had one of the largest increases in rents over the past four years. Newcomers generally arrive in Canada with lower household incomes and are more likely to be confined to unsuitable housing than non-immigrants. As the province begins to see more people move out to lower-cost provinces like Alberta, it is likely that PEI’s newcomers will take part in that inter-provincial migration shift.
PEI is Canada’s most car-dependent province and has the lowest share of residents living within half a kilometer of the nearest bus stop. Although T3 has seen some of the fastest rates of ridership growth in the country due to newcomers riding on the bus, that trend will only sustain ridership in the short term. Public transit systems tend to benefit from immigration because it is often the only option available for cash-strapped newcomers who cannot afford a car of their own. But if PEI continues to lose immigrants even when population growth rates eventually stabilize, this will be reflected in a stagnant transit ridership base unless the system can evolve to meet the needs of current and future riders alike.
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Despite these vulnerabilities, there are some things that PEI is starting to get right on immigration program reform. If leveraged, they could go a long way to improving the Island’s lagging retention rates.
Historically speaking, PEI’s provincial nomination program (PNP) has been the province’s largest source of newcomers but also its largest drag on retention. Over 90 per cent of immigrants to PEI between 2007 and 2020 arrived through the provincial nomination, but more than two-thirds of PNP immigrants left to another within five years of their arrival. More than half of all immigrants who were first admitted to PEI now live in either Ontario or British Columbia.
But lately, PEI has been doing well by retaining immigrants who arrive through other programs including as refugees, family members, and skills-based program beneficiaries.
Statistics Canada has attributed this growing success to the Atlantic Immigration Pilot Program (AIPP), which “focuses on collaboration between governments, employers, communities and settlement agencies to address these issues.” Due to its focus on the role of settlement services and on the importance of recruiting highly skilled non-permanent residents, AIPP became a permanent program in 2022.
Another silver lining for PEI is that retention rates appear strong among immigrants with pre-admission experiences (e.g., temporary workers or international students). The share of taxfiler immigrants with these sorts of experiences is growing, surpassing 90 per cent of all new immigrants in 2021. This could improve retention among recent graduates and temporary workers in the long run, provided there are community and employment opportunities which make settling on the Island more viable.
There are obviously some limitations with the data presented. For starters, there is a big lag between the date from which data are reported (the last five-year retention figure we have is for immigrants who arrived in 2016). Additionally, the data may not be fully representative because immigrants to PEI were among the least likely in Canada to file an income tax return within a year of landing. Another factor which will need to be accounted for is the impact of the PEI government’s decision to cancel the entrepreneur stream of its PNP program in 2018. That will likely show improving retention rates for the 2022 and 2023 tax years, but Statistics Canada data on filings for the past year will only be available as early as 2025 and 2026 respectively.
Putting those caveats aside, even the data we currently have show the province’s strengths and weaknesses in migrant retention. PEI is dead last for immigration retention, but it has seen improvements over the past decade. PEI’s new population strategy should leverage existing skills-based programming, recruit from pools temporary residents who have studied/worked on the Island, and provide pathways to employment in sectors with acute shortages. Above all, the province needs to give newcomers a reason to stay.
