Page 17 - 05_July-Aug 2024

↘
Alberta actually attracted permanent residents at
a higher rate [relative to population] than the rest of Canada.
197,355 B.C.
IMMIGRATED 2016 - 2021
YEG
fourth most in Canada, just a few thousand behind British Columbia’s 197,355.
Although fourth, Alberta actually attracted permanent residents at a higher rate (relative to population) than the rest of Canada. With only 11.5 per cent of the country’s total population over that span, it became home to 14.5 per cent of Canada’s new permanent residents — about 21 per cent more than its population share suggests. Quebec, conversely, attracted just 0.8 per cent more permanent residents than Alberta did, despite almost one-quarter of all Canadians residing there. (Important note: Alberta’s share of permanent residents, like its total population growth, fluctuates with its economic boom- and-bust-cycles).
On the
Up and Up
IMMIGRANT-MADE, EDMONTON- BASED APP ENSURES NO CANADIAN NEWCOMER MUST DO IT ALONE
ROUGH LANDING
→ When Kelise Williams moved
to Edmonton as a permanent resident from Trinidad and Tobago five years ago, she arrived with her two kids, her husband, plenty of ambition and the warmest clothes she owned. But she didn’t have a credit card, so her family had nowhere to stay.
JULY/AUGUST 2024
74,685
193,130 AB
17
TOTAL IMMIGRATED LANDED IN EDMONTON
“We spent the first night in Canada in the lobby of a hotel because I didn’t have a credit card to put on file so that they could give me the room,” Williams says. “I didn’t know any-
one. I didn’t have anybody to talk to, didn’t have anybody to call. So that was actually the motivation behind starting [the] UpRow [app], to prepare newcomers to know where to go, to reach out to a trusted source. It’s like a digital hub for settlement services.”
NOT ALONE
While Williams and her family took their trip solo, they weren’t the only ones making journeys to a new, colder land. Stats Canada shows that from 2016 until the 2021 census, 193,130 people immigrated to Alberta (74,685 of whom landed in Edmonton), the