Nova Scotia sets immigration record in 2021

When Rimple Dhunna arrived in Nova Scotia in 2007, he didn't meet another Indian person for two months.

"When I came, there was not a huge community," Dhunna said. "I could count the Indian families on fingers."

Much has changed since then.

Little more than 1,000 newcomers were settling in Nova Scotia each year, on average, in the early 2000s, butimmigration has been on the rise more recently.

There were 7,500 arrivals in 2019, making it a record-setting year. That record was broken again last year.

In 2021, 9,020 new permanent residents settled in the province a statistic the provincial government released this week.

Dhunna said he sees the evidence of that everyday in the growing Indian community in Halifax. He runs a Facebook group for Indian newcomers to the area, which has nearly 16,000 members.

One of the new members to that community is Bhawna Sharma. Originally fromDelhi, India, she moved to Halifax with her husband and two young daughters last February.

In-demand professions targeted

Sharma's path to Canadian residency was paved by a provincial immigration program for early childhood educators. There aren't enough of them to meet demand in Nova Scotia, so the province opened a targeted immigration stream in 2018 to help employers with international recruitment.

There are similar streams for several other in-demand professions, including continuing care assistants, nurses and physicians.

The program made it easier for Sharma and her family to move to Canada, but she said there were still some hiccups along the way. Despite applying for her professional certification several months before leaving India, she wasn't cleared to start working until three months after her arrival.

However, she avoided one of the other major challenges that many newcomers face finding housing.

"I heard and I read that no one gets an apartment, [especially] new people, when they don't have a credit history or don't have a good score.But my property manager was super good," Sharma said.

Sharma has been renting since her arrival, but she recently bought a home in Eastern Passage, which she expects to move into next month. She said she plans to be there for the long haul.

"It's good to be here in Nova Scotia. I'm not going anywhere from here, I'm not moving anywhere," she said with a laugh.

70 per cent retention rate

According to the province, Nova Scotia's retention rate for immigrants is currently around 70 per cent, which it touts as the highest in Atlantic Canada. The government credits that retention rate to settlement support services.

The Immigrant Services Association of Nova Scotia is the primary agency that co-ordinates and offers those supports, helping thousands of newcomers each year.

Wellington Osazuwa arrived from Nigeria six months ago, and he pointed to the association as a crucial part of his family's settlement experience, as well as the Nigerian community. Immigrants from Nigeria, as well as India, China, South Korea and the Philippines made up the largest group of new Nova Scotians last year.

Like Sharma, Osazuwa was selected for entry to Nova Scotia because of local demand for his profession; both he and his wife are accountants.

"I think we're quite lucky because my wife got a job within the first one month, I got a job within the second month And our profession is also very lucrative. So we got engaged working almost immediately," he said.

Osazuwa said his family had initially been open to moving anywhere in Canada, but once they started researching Nova Scotia, he said they became excited by the opportunities they saw.

"[Halifax] is an emerging city more job opportunities, lesser competition compared to the Vancouvers and the Torontos," he said.

"It was more pocket friendly to live in the province as well."

Surging cost of housing a shock

That was, it seemed "pocket friendly" when Osazuwa started planning to move here. The boom of the housing market over the past two years came as a shock when he and his family landed last year.

"The price was so high for a two bedroom I mean, it had skyrocketed within the space of a year."

He said he found himself applying for apartments with hundreds of other applicants. It made for a few expensive months of staying in an Airbnb before finding a long-term rental in Dartmouth.

Osazuwa had been waiting to move to Canada since 2019, but he said the process was slowed because of the pandemic. His family was not alone in that experience. There was a notable dip in immigration in 2020, with about 3,500 landings, sandwiched between the much higher figures of 7,500 and 9,000 in the years before and after, respectively.

Those numbers don't include inter-provincial migration, which has been increasing for at least the past six years. In 2021, about 10,000 net new people came to Nova Scotia from other provinces and territories.