Chris Selley: People are fleeing Toronto and the city doesn’t seem to care

Public transit that no one is in charge of; a city council that talks a much bigger game on affordable housing than it actually plays; a resolute aversion to fun and entrepreneurialism; shocking crime. Why wouldn't people leave?

What if Canada’s largest city

started shrinking, and it wasn’t all that huge an issue, even with a municipal election just months away? This is the odd situation in which Toronto, forever caught between aspiring to and boasting of “world class” status, may now find itself. Hopefully not.

For years, Hogtown has been able to boast of being one of North America’s fastest-growing cities. Over the 12 months ending July 2020, Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Urban Research and Land Development found Toronto’s “census metropolitan area” (CMA) — population over 6.5 million at the time — had grown by more people than any North American urban area except for Dallas and Phoenix. And now ... not.

TMU’s latest figures released last week show Toronto’s not even in the game anymore, having apparently peaked at around 7.1 million people. In 2025, relative to 2024, the city actually lost 1,000 people. A fairly astonishing 77,000 people left the Toronto CMA for (they hope) greener pastures elsewhere in Canada.

That’s over one per cent of the population. To put that in some context, the “metropolitan statistical area” comprising Washington, D.C. and suburbs in Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland, lost 24,000 people to other U.S. destinations. That’s roughly 0.3 per cent, and D.C. more than made up for it with births and robust international migration.

Of course, plenty of people also moved to the Toronto area from abroad: 53,000 in 2025 alone, according to TMU. But it couldn’t make up for domestic out-migration. In addition to Calgary and Edmonton, the fastest-growing Canadian destinations by percentage in recent years include Moncton, Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo, Saskatoon, Regina and St. Catharines-Niagara.

Ample priorresearch tells us who Toronto is losing. Specifically: young families, and young couples considering starting a family. (There are other Canadian cities suffering the same problem, but none quite so spectacularly.)

Torontonians aren’t just moving to the suburbs, either: The declining CMA includes huge swaths of the Greater Toronto Area, all the way east to Ajax, west to Milton and north to Lake Simcoe. They’re leaving Toronto’s orbit entirely. This is not by any means all bad news.

Frankly, the way Toronto has been run in recent years, it ought to shrink. For many Canadians who didn’t grow up here — and an increasing number of those who did — Toronto has always been a bit like New York City is to Americans. It’s a place to make maximum money and have maximum fun (within Upper Canadian tolerances) early in your career, before reassessing things in the light of wanting to raise a family in a home larger than a shoebox (or shoe).

Assuming all these Canadian growth hotspots can handle the population growth in terms of schools, health care and affordable housing, it brings the promise of greater and more dispersed prosperity. That’s a big assumption in a place like Moncton, whose population grew by nearly 20 per cent between 2020 and 2024. Problems there include a basic infrastructure deficit and a (somewhat ironic) shortage of skilled trades.

While Moncton has grown in recent years, New Brunswick as a whole has actually been pretty flat, even slightly declining. For those escaping Canada’s biggest cities, however, it ought to be a godsend — certainly in the longer term. One of the things Americans have going for them, if they decide New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or some other megalopolis isn’t for them anymore, or never was, is a large variety of smaller cities with ample job opportunities in diverse industries, including at the very tip of the corporate pyramid.

Seattle has Amazon, Costco and Microsoft. America’s health-care giants are based in and around Providence, R.I., Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Dallas, Philadelphia, Hartford, Conn. and Columbus, Ohio. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are all based in New York, but other banking colossi are based in Charlotte, N.C., San Francisco, Washington and Pittsburgh.

Meanwhile, Canadian headquarters are monolithically based in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary (though, of course, they hire nationwide as well). And Montreal is essentially off-limits to the 96-odd per cent of Canadians outside of Quebec who don’t speak French. To a great extent, this difference only stands to reason: The U.S. is a far bigger country than Canada; it’s going to have more big cities to choose from.

What it isn’t, or shouldn’t be, is good news for Toronto. Many of the reasons it’s shrinking are entirely preventable: Public transit that no one is in charge of; a city council that talks a much bigger game on affordable housing than it actually plays, and is still beholden to single-family homeowners with backyards; a resolute aversion to fun and entrepreneurialism; and crimes that never (and I mean never) used to happen here, such as home invasions and carjackings. Mayoral candidate Brad Bradford seems to have a handle on the broader issue.

“While city hall has been raising taxes and creating more congestion, other cities are pulling ahead, actively attracting the young families and workers Toronto should be winning,” he told the Toronto Sun last week, reacting to the TMU data. As someone who rather likes Toronto — or at least, what it could be — this is encouraging. But as always, I wonder if a critical mass of Torontonians who got theirs and don’t understand what all the fuss is about will yet again carry the day.

National Post cselley@postmedia.com