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The London area, long knocked for its slow population growth, is now second among Canada’s fastest-growing areas, newly released statistics show.

The London census metropolitan area, which also takes in Strathroy, St. Thomas and portions of Middlesex and Elgin counties, grew at a rate of 2.3 per cent between 2018 and 2019, Statistics Canada figures published Thursday show.

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The London region’s population, as of July 2019, is 545,441.

Migration — of international students, newcomers and people moving from other parts of the province — is the main driver behind the recent trend, which has seen the London area’s population grow by almost 50,000 people since 2014, said Don Kerr, a demographer and professor at King’s University College.

“That is quite significant,” he said. “This population growth for London is pretty high by historical standards.”

In the last year, for instance, the area saw a net gain of 3,817 in intra-provincial migration, meaning people moving from other parts of Ontario to London.

That growth can be explained in part by people being pushed out from the Greater Toronto Area by its high cost of living, a trend known as “drive until you qualify,” said economist Mike Moffatt, a professor at the Ivey School of Business at Western University.

“Families drive as far away as they need to from Toronto to be able to afford a house,” Moffatt said, noting a large portion of those people continue to work in the GTA.

“When you dive into the numbers, it’s largely young families, the biggest group, moving out of the Toronto area . . . It’s not a coincidence that the two fastest-growing parts of Canada are the Kitchener-Waterloo region and London.”

More significant, however, is the 3,146 new immigrants choosing London as their home and the net gain of 4,246 of non-permanent residents, which includes international students, Kerr said.

“It’s really the international migration that is explaining (this growth)”, he said. “And there seems to be an upturn in the number of international students living in the city, which is probably an important part of it.”

Though a growing population is a better problem to have than to be bleeding people, such growth brings its own challenges, including extra pressure on an already tight housing market, an issue explored by The Free Press in its continuing series, Face It.