Quebec doing better at retaining immigrants, Atlantic Canada still struggling [Video]

Immigrants are increasingly choosing to stay in Quebec, according to a new report from Statistics Canada, but the same isn’t true in the Atlantic region, which continues to lose newcomers to the rest of the country.

Out of all the immigrants admitted into Quebec in 2021, almost 94 per cent of them were still in the province one year later — a jump of 8.8 percentage points compared with the 2018 cohort of newcomers. The largest increases of newcomers choosing to stay in Quebec were in the economic category, the StatCan report said.

Catherine Xhardez, assistant professor of political science at Université de Montréal, said the StatCan report is welcome news for Quebec because unlike in the rest of the country, the provincial government controls its economic immigration stream.

“It’s also a question of competition. You want the best and brightest to stay because if you invest in them, if you select them, you do not want …