OTTAWA—The Toronto area remained the top destination for immigrants to Canada in the five years before the latest census, even as new arrivals flock to the Prairies in increasing numbers, newly-released data shows.

The share of recent immigrants to Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba more than doubled between 2001 and 2016, according to new data on the 2016 census that was published Wednesday by Statistics Canada. Of those provinces, Alberta experienced the biggest jump, with 17.1 per cent of new immigrants moving there in 2016, compared with just 6.9 per cent 15 years earlier.

At the same time, the proportion of new immigrants — defined as people who moved to Canada in the past five years — to Ontario has dropped significantly, from 55.9 per cent in 2001 to 39 per cent in 2016.

Despite this, the Toronto “census metropolitan area,” which includes the city itself and part of the surrounding region, remains the destination of choice for the largest number of immigrants to Canada. Between 2011 and 2016, almost 30 per cent of immigrants — 356,930 people — made Toronto their new home, almost double the total that moved to the Montreal area.

At this point, nearly half the people in the Toronto area (46.1 per cent) were born outside Canada, the highest proportion of any major urban centre in the country. The area is home to 36 per cent of the 7.5 million immigrants living in Canada, according to Stats Can data.

According to Statistics Canada, economic conditions in the various regions “undoubtedly played a major role in the geographic distribution of immigrants.” Alberta enjoyed the largest employment growth between 2011 and 2016, for instance — a jump of 7.8 per cent versus the national average of 5 per cent.

“There’s really a shift from central Canada and Toronto to the Prairie provinces,” said Jean-Pierre Corbeil, assistant director of the social and Aboriginal statistics division at Statistics Canada.

Immigrants to Canada are also coming from all over the world. Of the 1.2 million immigrants to arrive between 2011 and 2016, the largest number was born in the Philippines — 188,805. That was followed by India with 147,190, China with 129,020 and Iran at 42,070.

Corbeil said the top-three origin countries for immigrants to Toronto between 2011 and 2016 were India, China and the Philippines.

Almost 62 per cent of all immigrants between 2011 of 2016 were from Asia (versus 57 per cent in 2011), while 13.4 per cent of immigrants between 2011 and 2016 were born in Africa.

Matthew Cole, Data Analysis

Cameron Tulk, Data Visualization

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“This had a direct impact on the fact that the black population is above 1 million,” Corbeil said. “In terms of refugees, the biggest number — 29,945 — came from Syria, while Canada took in more than 15,000 refugees from Iraq, 6,100 from Afghanistan, 5,100 from Eritrea and 5,000 from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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