Inter-Provincial Migration Deep Dive

Historically, interprovincial migration to and from Nova Scotia has varied significantly over time. While this is so, since the mid-1990s, in-migration to Nova Scotia has remained relatively steady. Out-migration to other provinces has been the primary source of variation in net interprovincial migration. However, since 2014, in-migration has been trending upward and out-migration had trended downward.

Nova Scotia’s interprovincial migration flows have been driven to a significant extent by current macroeconomic conditions. As far back as the 1990s, the province’s net interprovincial migration has generally been counter-cyclical – net outmigration has slowed when the national economy is in recession and sped up when the national economy is expanding.

Interprovincial migration has tended to average around the break-even point during national recessions in the early 1990s, the early 2000s, and 2009, while there has been significant net outmigration during the economic boom of the mid-2000s and the post-2009 recovery period.

This suggests that interprovincial migration flows from Nova Scotia have been driven as much, or more, by strong labour demand pulls from provinces like Alberta and Ontario than it has been by local economic conditions. Migration from Nova Scotia to Alberta, for example, has been highly correlated with non-residential investment in Alberta associated largely with the oil and gas industry.

Since mid-2014, Nova Scotia has seen both an increase in the number of migrants coming from other provinces as well as a decrease in the number of migrants leaving for other provinces. As investment in Alberta declined over this period, fewer out-migrants from Nova Scotia were destined for Alberta. As of 2021/2022, annual out-migration to Alberta has declined to 43 per cent of what it had been in 2013/2014. This has reduced the size of net-migration substantially and has resulted in net population gains for Nova Scotia over the last five years. Nova Scotia saw a net population gain in the last year from all provinces (except Newfoundland and Labrador), with the largest gain from Ontario.

At the county level, net migration tends to follow the same overall trend as the provincial total. All counties saw net inflows of working age people in 2021/2022.

Changes to the Indicator, Baseline or Target:

• Due to historical revisions to the data by Statistics Canada, the baseline has been revised from -800 per year to -2,000 per year.
• “Working age” was defined as ages 18-64 for this goal.
• The target was maintained at +1,000 working age net inter-provincial migration per year.