BC Overtakes Ontario South African Immigrants: What Changed in 2025
For most of the past decade, “South Africans move to Ontario” was simply true, and treated as settled fact in almost every piece of emigration content aimed at this audience. Somewhere in 2025, that stopped being accurate: BC overtakes Ontario South African immigrants for the first time in the data, and hardly anyone has updated the story yet.
The numbers behind the shift
IRCC’s own Express Entry admissions data, which excludes Quebec, shows Ontario taking 825 South African admissions against British Columbia’s 670 across the combined 2023 to 2025 period — Ontario still comfortably ahead over that three-year window. But look at 2025 in isolation and the picture flips: British Columbia took 180 South African Express Entry admissions that year against Ontario’s 155, with Alberta a distant third at 65. Bc overtakes ontario south african immigrants for the first time in this data, on a year-by-year basis rather than the cumulative total.
Why where south africans move in canada 2025 actually shifted
This data can tell you what happened; it’s more careful to be honest about what it can’t fully explain. The shift lines up with a period of real disruption inside Ontario’s own provincial nomination program, which revoked its entire lineup of streams in May 2026 and relaunched with a single new pathway the following month — a genuinely unsettled year for anyone trying to route through Ontario specifically. It also lines up with British Columbia’s own 2026 immigration framework, grouped under Care, Build and Innovate priorities, which has kept BC’s provincial pathways more visibly active through the same period. Whether one caused the other, or both reflect a broader pull toward the Pacific coast, isn’t something this admissions data settles on its own.
The bigger picture behind both numbers
Bc versus ontario south african immigration shouldn’t obscure how small South Africa’s overall footprint is in Canada’s total intake. South African citizens made up roughly 0.28% of all 2025 Canadian permanent-resident admissions, and south african admissions stay small by province — numbers in the hundreds, not the thousands, for any single province in any single year. These are meaningful shifts within a genuinely small and specific population, not a mass reallocation of a huge cohort.
For context on where South Africans have historically settled once landed, 2021 Census data reported roughly 51,590 South Africa-born residents living in Canada, with Ontario home to about 21,540 of them and Toronto the single largest city concentration at just over 13,000 — Vancouver came in second at roughly 9,000. That stock reflects decades of accumulated settlement, though, not the current-year admissions pattern this shift is describing, and it’s worth treating that older figure as reported background rather than a live, current-year snapshot.
What this means for your own planning
This shift doesn’t tell you BC is now “better” than Ontario for your own situation, and it isn’t meant to. It does mean that any planning built on “Ontario is where South Africans go” as an unquestioned assumption is working from data that’s already a step behind where the numbers actually moved in 2025. Worth checking current provincial priorities directly, in whichever province your own occupation and circumstances point toward, rather than defaulting to where South Africans have historically landed.
Before assuming last decade’s pattern still holds, it’s worth checking how each province’s priorities are shifting year to year — our Provinces & Regions guide tracks exactly that.