2. Montréal

Population growth
Labour markets
Immigration
Immigrants and the labour market
Aboriginal People
Income and low income
Getting to work

2.1 Population growth

With a population of 3,635,733 in 2005, Montréal is Canada’s second largest census metropolitan area (Table 2). It comprises more than 60 municipalities, the largest of which are Montréal, Longueuil and Laval. Compared with the other two large CMAs, Montréal has grown slowly in recent decades, at an average annual rate of 0.8% since 1986.

The economic, demographic, historic and societal factors underlying differences in CMA growth are too numerous to address here. However, some insights are gained from examining the sources of population growth: natural increase, immigration and net internal migration. The latter two factors are found to be important in understanding Montréal’s slower growth rates.

At 0.7% of the CMA’s population per year between 1986 and 2005, Montréal received less net immigration per capita than Toronto or Vancouver (Figure 3). In fact, this low rate places Montréal on a similar footing with Ottawa–Gatineau, Calgary, Kitchener and London, three CMAs not considered to be “gateway” cities for immigration. However, growth due to immigration was up slightly in Montréal in 2004 and 2005, reaching levels near 1% per year and approaching rates not seen since the early 1990s, but still well below Toronto and Vancouver. Montréal also typically loses about 0.4% per year of its population to migration (both inter- and intra-provincial), a rate similar to that of Toronto but higher than that of Vancouver, which sees a small net gain each year due to internal migration.

Compared with Toronto and Vancouver, Montréal also has a slightly less educated labour force, with 22.2% of workers having a university degree. This places it sixth among CMAs, and below the all-CMA average of 23.1%.

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2.2 Labour markets

With two million workers in 2005, Montréal remains the second largest labour market in Canada, behind Toronto. However, it is relatively slow-growing, adding just 18,000 workers per year from 1986 to 2005, for an annual growth rate of 1%. Montréal’s labour force growth rate lagged behind the growth rates of Toronto (1.8%) and Vancouver (2.3%), over the same period.

At 8.7%, Montréal has the 4th highest unemployment rate among all 27 CMAs in 2005 (only St. John’s, Saguenay, and Trois-Rivières were higher). Its employment rate is also relatively low, although, unlike the other large CMAs, it did improve slightly since the previous cyclical peak in 1989. This was because of a rise in employment among women.

Median annual earnings for full-year, full-time workers in 2000 were lowest in Montréal, compared with Toronto and Vancouver. At $35,000, full-year, full-time earnings were $5,000 below Toronto and $4,400 below Vancouver. Real median earnings fell slightly in Montréal from 1980 to 2000, dropping by $900. Increases in earnings among women were offset by decreases in earnings among men, keeping the median relatively unchanged.

This stability in earnings masks an important polarization in earnings in Montréal. Measured at the 10th percentile, earnings fell 22% from $17,300 to $13,600 from 1980 to 2000; at the 90th percentile, earnings rose 6.8% to $70,000 over the same period. While earnings were stable for workers aged 45 to 54, earnings among workers 25 to 34 fell 12.9%, reflecting an important divergence in earnings by age.

Finally, as discussed further below, there were strong declines in the labour market outcomes of immigrants.

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2.3 Immigration

Two central facts about immigration are evident in Montréal: the differences in the source countries of immigrants to Montréal compared with the rest of Canada, and the changes in these source countries over the past two decades.

According to the 2001 Census, Montréal immigrants came from a much more diverse set of countries than immigrants to Toronto or Vancouver. In Toronto, 41.3% of recent immigrants came from one of five countries, and in Vancouver, 62.3% of all immigrants came from one of five countries. In Montréal, the top five recent-immigrant source countries accounted for just 29.5% of immigrants from 1991 to 2001. The top source country, with 6.6% of recent immigrants to Montréal, was Haiti.

Compared with Toronto or Vancouver, Montréal was much more likely to receive immigrants from African countries from 1991 to 2001 (18.2% of recent immigrants) and Caribbean, Central and South American countries (19.1% or recent immigrants), but less likely to receive immigrants from East and Southeast Asia. Montréal has particularly strong ties to immigrants from French-speaking countries.

Like Toronto and Vancouver, the source countries of immigrants to Montréal have changed markedly since 1981. Immigration to Canada from North America and Europe has declined, and immigration from Africa and Eastern Europe has grown. In part, it is this shifting away of source countries from North America and Europe towards Africa and the Caribbean (particularly in Montréal) and East and Southeast Asia (particularly in Toronto and Vancouver) that has caused a rising number of immigrants to reside in Canada’s three largest CMAs. Immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, East Asia and South Asia have a high and increasing propensity to settle in Montréal, Toronto or Vancouver, and immigrants from these regions have accounted for a growing share of all new arrivals in Canada. Conversely, immigrants from North America and Northern and Western Europe have a far lower propensity to settle in Montréal, Toronto or Vancouver, and account for a declining share of all new arrivals.

When asked about why they chose to live in a particular city, the largest share of newly landed immigrants in Montréal (31%) cited the presence of a spouse, partner or family member in the area; an additional 18% cited the presence of friends. Familial and social networks are clearly primary considerations in the decision of where to live. The unique attributes of certain CMAs also play a role in attracting immigrants. For Montréal, 19% of economic class immigrants said that language was an important consideration.

Some other facts about recent immigrants in Montréal:

• 53% mainly use a language other than English or French in the home, compared with 64% in Toronto
• 35% have a university degree, compared with 22% of the Canadian-born residents (aged 25 to 54)
• in Montréal about 1 in 10 children aged 0 to 17 is an immigrant or the Canadian-born child of recent immigrants, compared with 1 in 4 in Toronto and Vancouver
• about one-half of these immigrant children reside in households where neither English nor French is the language used most often by the parents
• older recent immigrants are more likely to attend school than Canadian-born residents of similar age
• recent immigrants are more likely to use public transit in their daily commute—twice as likely as Canadian-born Montréal residents
• Montréal residents are relatively unlikely to live in owned accommodation, and this is particularly true of recent immigrants: in Montréal, just 11.4% of immigrants who entered Canada from 1996 to 2001 owned their homes, compared with 41.3% in Vancouver.

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2.4 Immigrants and the labour market

As in other large CMAs, recent immigrants to Montréal have had an increasingly difficult time in the labour market.

Recent immigrants have much lower employment rates than do Canadian-born residents, and immigrant employment rates have been falling in recent decades. According to the 2001 Census, only 60% of recent immigrants aged 25 to 54 were employed in that year, compared with 82.4% of the Canadian-born residents in the same age group. In the 1981 Census, the employment rate of immigrants aged 25 to 54 who had arrived in Canada between 1971 and 1981 was 72% in 1981, slightly higher than that of Canadian-born residents.

Although recent immigrants had high university attainment rates, the share of university-educated immigrants in low- or moderate-skilled jobs was high compared with Canadian-born university graduates in 2001. For example, among male university graduates aged 25 to 54, about 21% were employed in jobs requiring low or moderate skills, compared with less than 10% of the Canadian-born university graduates. Nevertheless, skill utilization was higher in Montréal than in Toronto or Vancouver, where about one-quarter of recent immigrants aged 25 to 54 with a university degree were employed in jobs requiring low or moderate skills.

Lastly, annual earnings of recent immigrants are also low compared with Canadian-born residents. Like the employment rate, earnings also declined across successive cohorts. In 2000, a recent immigrant aged 25 to 54 employed full-year, full-time earned an average $31,000 per year, compared with $43,900 among the Canadian-born workers in the same age group. Moreover, in 1980, an immigrant who arrived between 1971 and 1981 earned $39,400, which was 27% more than immigrants of the next decade. These conclusions hold even after accounting for other characteristics such as education.

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2.5 Aboriginal People

Montréal reported 11,085 Aboriginal People in the 2001 Census, giving it the smallest Aboriginal population of the 3 largest CMAs. Aboriginals made up less than 0.3% of the population. Notably, these counts exclude the Kahnawake reserve, which was within Montréal CMA boundaries but did not participate in the 2001 Census.

As in other CMAs, important gaps are evident in socio-economic indicators between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal population:

• the Aboriginal employment rate in Montréal was 68.8% in 2001, compared with 79.3% among non-Aboriginals
• median employment income for all Aboriginal workers was $20,033 in 2000, compared with $25, 216 among non-Aboriginal
• Aboriginal People in Montréal received 17% of their income from government transfers in 2000, compared with 12% among non-Aboriginals
• 38% of Aboriginal children lived in lone-parent families in 2001, compared with 20% of non-Aboriginal children
• the low-income rate among Aboriginal People was 35.5% in 2000, compared with 21.3% among non-Aboriginals.

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2.6 Income and low income

The questions of income and low income remain central to understanding conditions in Canadian CMAs. The basic questions to ask are:

• What is the median standard of economic well-being in the CMA?
• Is there evidence of a widening gap between the rich and poor?
• What groups are at risk of exclusion based on having too little income?

The economic well-being of the typical Montréal family has recovered in recent years after steadily falling for at least two decades. Median after-tax income of an economic family of two persons or more fell from $50,200 in 1980 to a low of $41,600 in 1993. It turned around and rose steadily throughout the 2000s and reached $49,100 by 2004, on par with levels seen in the early 1980s.

Of course, not all families necessarily benefit equally from economic booms. For example, the share of families with after-tax income of less than $20,000 has remained more or less steady since 1980 at about 9%. However, the after-tax low-income rate has shown strong signs of improvement: it has fallen steadily since its high of 26.7% in 1997. By 2004, it was 13.7%, lower than at any point since 1980, when this statistic first becomes available for Montréal. The low-income rate among children in 2004, 13.5%, rests near a 25-year low point (which was marked in 2004).

While these gains among low-income families were quite important, the fastest growing income group in the 2000s was composed of families earning $80,000 or more. Throughout the 1980s, about 13% to 15% of economic families with two or more persons earned after-tax incomes of $80,000 or more. This fell to 10% for most of the early 1990s, but by 2001 to 2004 about 20% of families had an income greater than $80,000. This fast growth among economic families at the top of the income distribution reflects increasing economic inequality among families.

Most of this recent rise in income in Montréal has taken place since 2000, and so data from the 2001 Census do not reflect this trend. The census does not collect information on income taxes, so census-based income statistics are only available on a before-tax basis. Nevertheless, the census remains the best and most accurate source of data for understanding economic conditions among certain sub-populations in the CMA. The 2001 Census shows that low-income rates were much higher among certain groups.

For example, the before-tax low-income rate was 45.6% among recent immigrants in Montréal, compared with 21.4% in the CMA as a whole. However, because there were fewer recent immigrants in Montréal, immigrants made up a much smaller share of the low-income population in Montréal than they did in Toronto or Vancouver. The low-income rate was also higher among Aboriginal People (35.5%) and lone-parent families (47.9%). Results from the 2006 Census will shed some light on how much these groups have gained from the more recent income growth.

The census also remains the best source for understanding the geographic location of low-income persons. We know that some central cities of Canadian CMAs have not grown as fast as the suburbs, and some have lost population. This raises the question of whether low income has become concentrated in the downtown cores of Canadian cities as it has in some U.S. cities.
 
In fact, Canadian CMAs are diverse in this regard. Montréal is one example of a CMA that has several distinct clusters of low-income neighbourhoods surrounding a relatively affluent downtown (Figure 4). Furthermore, what were once low-income neighbourhoods in the downtown core are being redeveloped, and the number of these neighbourhoods found in the downtown core is being reduced. In Montréal, for example, the Plateau Mont-Royal was one of two areas with low-income rates greater than 40% in 1980, but not in 2000. The other was Old Montréal—the site of many new condominium developments. At the same time, three clusters of low-income neighbourhoods farther from the city centre grew over this period: Hochelaga-Maisonneuve in the east end, Côte-des-Neiges and Park Extension.

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2.7 Getting to work

Modest population growth in Montréal has meant that it has not yet seen an expansion of suburban employment growth to the same extent as was the case in Toronto. Between 1996 and 2001 Montréal added 70,600 jobs within 15 km of the city centre, compared to 63,800 beyond 15 km.

But like the other large CMAs, Montréal faces challenges getting people to work on public transit when their jobs are outside the city core. While 54.9% of the 269,000 workers commuting to the central business district took public transit, only 15.0% of the 196,000 workers commuting to the business area located around Pierre Elliot Trudeau Airport did so. The majority of the rest drove.