Which Province in Canada Needs the Most Immigrants? [Answered]

Which province in Canada needs the most immigrants?

These types of questions have increased over time as more and more people learn about the Provincial Nominee Programs.

For those who don’t know, Provincial Nominee Programs take in foreign skilled workers, from all over the world, to the specific Canadian province that sponsored them. These workers will then contribute to those provinces’ infrastructure and help with their growth.

Also, different provinces have different requirements in order to get invited.

For instance, some provinces want you to have a job offer while others want you to have siblings or friends that work in the province you want to apply for.

As long as you can fulfill these requirements, the chances of getting invited are high.

However, the number of required immigrants also plays a role in getting invited.

If there are many immigrants required in a specific Canadian province, there are higher chances to get an invitation to that province.

On the contrary, the chances to get an invitation if there are fewer immigrants required are very low.

This is where the idea of the Canadian province that requires the most immigrants comes from.

Which province in Canada needs the most immigrants?

To answer this question, we need to revisit the idea of the Provincial Nominee Program.

The idea is to invite workers from all over the world based on the needs of the province.

The needs and wants of provinces change from time to time.

No province can have the same exact need forever.

For instance, a province may need to bring in thousands of marketers at some point until the need is fulfilled.

Another province might want to invite people who are technicians until there are enough technicians in the province.

As long as there are needs to be fulfilled, the provinces will keep on inviting immigrants.

To this date, Ontario has the highest number of immigrants living in the province, followed by Quebec.

To be more precise, over 130,000 immigrants were found to be living in Ontario in 2019 alone.

However, keep in mind that this number is of people who live in Ontario, not the people who moved to Canada using the Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program or OINP which is Ontario’s version of the Provincial Nominee Program. Each province has its own program. 

Since it is home to Ottawa, Canada’s capital, a lot of immigrants prefer to live there compared to other provinces in the country.

But we can’t be sure whether or not these immigrants applied through the OINP.

This leaves us again with the idea of “wants and needs”.

You can not predict which province in Canada needs the most immigrants.

The needs and wants of provinces change over time.

However, we can look into the past data of required immigrants in some of the Canadian provinces.

The table below shows the provinces and the number of immigrants that moved to those provinces using the Provincial Nominee Programs in 2018:

Based on this past data, Ontario again hits the top spot under the Provincial Nominee Program, followed by British Columbia and Saskatchewan.

However, it is not necessary that Ontario holds the first spot for needing more immigrants into the province.

As mentioned, Ontario may fulfill its needs and then could be replaced by any other Canadian province for the top spot. 

However, historically, the province of Ontario has needed the most immigrants.