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It’s the London region’s largest spike in population in a generation.

After years of sluggish growth, including in the fallout of the 2008 economic meltdown, the wider London area has turned a corner and now ranks among the fastest-growing centres in Canada, new Statistics Canada estimates suggest.

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The latest population estimates by the federal agency put the London census metropolitan area as the country’s fifth-fastest growing community. Only Peterborough, Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo, Ottawa-Gatineau and Windsor are growing faster.

While the region had averaged just under one per cent growth since 2001, between 2017 and 2018 its population grew by 2.4 per cent and reached 532,984 last July, Statistics Canada said – a turnaround one expert calls “significant.”

In the two previous years, the population also grew sharply — an estimated 2.2 and 1.7 per cent, respectively.

“For the last 20 years, we have been lagging behind other cities in terms of population growth in London. Now, we are among the fastest-growing communities in Canada,” said Don Kerr, a sociologist and demographer at King’s University College in London.