Ontario might be the most popular destination for new immigrants but new census data shows many Ontarians are choosing to move out of the province to other parts of the country.

The number of foreign-born residents in Canada is now one-in-five, an increase of 13.6 per cent from 2001 with the vast majority of them settling in Ontario, according to new census data from Statistics Canada.

However, the census also showed that more people moved away from Ontario to other parts of the country in the last five years.

The new data focuses on immigration, language and migration trends across Canada.

Between 2001 and 2006, the most popular relocation destination for Ontarians was British Columbia followed by Alberta and then Quebec.

But during that same period, Ontario's overall population increased by 750,000 people, mostly because of new immigrants.

"6.2 million people in Canada were born outside of Canada. And that foreign-born proportion of the population is at its highest in 75 years," Anil Arora, director general of the StatsCan census program, told CTV's Canada AM.

"We see their growth rate to be four times that of the Canadian-born population."

In the past five years, 1.1 million immigrants have made Canada their home, with most of them settling in Ontario, Arora said.

According to the statistics:

  • 52.3 per cent settled in Ontario
  • 17 per cent in Quebec
  • 16 per cent in B.C.

"Some 86 per cent of all recent immigrants, these are the people who immigrated to Canada between 2001 and 2006 made either Ontario, Quebec, or British Columbia their home," Arora said.

And perhaps not surprisingly, almost two-thirds of the nation's foreign-born population settled in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.

In Ontario, Brantford was also a popular destination as well as Guelph, Oshawa, Barrie, Kitchener, Peterborough and the Ottawa-Gatineau region.

Those areas attracted more people from other metropolitan areas than it lost to them in the last five years.

That wasn't the case for the Greater Sudbury Region, Hamilton, London and Montreal, all municipalities that attracted fewer people from other metropolitan areas across the province than it gained from them in the past five years.

Surge of immigrants from Middle East, Asia

The census data also shows a surge in foreign-born immigrants from Asian and Middle Eastern countries, with those countries striding ahead of immigration from European countries.

Most foreign-born immigrants to Canada in the past five years -- 14 per cent -- were from China. India followed at 11.6 per cent, then the Philippines at 7 per cent and Pakistan at 5.2 per cent.

Those numbers are reflected in language statistics also released by StatsCan on Tuesday. The number of allophones, that's people whose mother tongue is anything but English or French, hit 80 per cent.

But the number of Canadians who can speak both French and English also rose to 17.4 per cent across the country.

Here is a list of the top-five mother tongues in Canada and their increase since 2001:

  • Chinese up 16 per cent.
  • Italian up 7 per cent.
  • German up 7 per cent.
  • Punjabi up 6 per cent.
  • Spanish up 5 per cent.

Jack Jedwab, of the Association for Canadian Studies in Ottawa, said the numbers are good news in Canada.

"Immigration is crucial in terms of offsetting the demographic dependency that Canada risks facing in the future," Jedwab told Canada AM.

"As the percentage of people over the age of 65 who are not part of the working population grows substantially, we'll need an important critical mass of people working age."