Population of Toronto

The population of the Toronto CMA was 5,304,100 in 2005.

The population of the city proper stood at 2,481,494 in 2001, up from 635,395 in 1991.

Toronto’s CMA is the most populous in Canada; Montréal, in the province of Québec, is second largest at 3,635,700 (2005 estimate).

After 1945, job opportunities in Toronto were so great that a large influx of European immigrants from many countries contributed to the city’s population growth.

In some years of the 1950s Canada actually received more immigrants than the United States, even though the United States had ten times as many people.
The largest share came to Toronto.

In the 1960s and later, fewer immigrants came from Europe, where economies had become stronger. Instead, more immigrants arrived from the Caribbean islands and Asia.

After 1970 the population growth was primarily in the communities around the metropolitan area.

Despite a faltering Canadian economy in the 1990s, immigrants continued to arrive in the Toronto CMA, most conspicuously from Hong Kong. People of Chinese origin accounted for over 9 percent of the city’s population at the 2001 census.

Foreign-born residents constitute 44 percent of the population, the highest metropolitan percentage on the North American continent.

The ethnic breakdown of metropolitan Toronto in the 2001 census included Canadian, 18.5 percent; English, 16.9 percent; Scottish, 11.1 percent; Irish, 10.5 percent; Chinese, 9.4 percent; Italian, 9.2 percent; East Indian, 7.4 percent; French, 4.7 percent; German, 4.7 percent; Portuguese, 3.7 percent; Polish, 3.6 percent; Jewish, 3.5 percent; Jamaican, 3.2 percent; and Filipino, 3.0 percent.