BC Interprovincial and International Migration

As I await the annual census metropolitan area population data from mid-2013 I have updated my series on tracking interprovincial and international migration to and from BC through 2012 (source). BC interprovincial migration is primarily to and from Alberta, Ontario, and spread between the other provinces and territories. I have not broken down international migration into countries of origin, but the majority are from Asia, and about one in four are non-permanent residents.

Here is net international and interprovincial migration:

Here is the change of each of the categories year-on-year:

Here is the total interprovincial "volume" (ie in-migrants plus out-migrants). This indicates how many bodies are passing the border. If there is zero net migration in a category that means as many are leaving as are arriving.

The next graph is the net interprovincial migration as a percentage of total migration in a category. This gives a sense of the magnitude of the "vector" of migration. The larger the deviation from zero, the more "biased" the migration is.

I looked at Alberta-BC migration in more detail, by quarter through Q3 2013:

A few observations:

• Net international migration has remained steady since 2010. (As mentioned about one in four net international are nonpermanent residents)
• Migration to and from Alberta has been the most volatile over the past 30 years, which makes some sense as, one assumes, the threshold one overcomes to move to Alberta is lower than to other parts of the country.
• Negative net interprovincial migration from Alberta was a major contributor to lower population growth in 2012. So far in 2013 this number has seen an improvement, meaning this component's headwinds that persisted through the late 1990s and early 2000s are not re-appearing.

Note these values are for BC, not Vancouver; there are intraprovincial migration components, as well as the natural increase, that contribute to a region's overall population growth. I eagerly await the major cities annual population growth data to ascertain how much of the population growth of 2013 has been in the Vancouver area.