It's important because population growth by itself automatically increases GDP. People have to eat, have to be housed and have to put clothes on, so automatically, there's going to be more spending and more income from that.
What's interesting is that the only two countries that are growing rapidly these days in terms of population are Canada and the U.S. I go back to, again, the economists recently looked at the U.S. economy. They were lavish in their praise for its ability to innovate. They noted one of the strengths of the U.S. economy was that they had what they called a demographic advantage.
Isn't that interesting? We have an even better advantage. We have faster population growth. We have a higher rate of immigration. The Americans were able to turn that into an advantage and into more growth, yet in Canada we weren't.
I suspect the reason they dropped GDP per capita was that we had this record surge in population in the last 12 months, partly because of a catch-up going back to the pandemic shutdown. The population growth we've had in Canada in the last year was, I think, the 12th strongest in the world. We're up there with African nations and Afghanistan. This 2.8% growth is a significant stimulus to growth, yet GDP does nothing.