What is confirmed
Confirmed: Statistics Canada table 17-10-0040-01, Estimates of the components of international migration, quarterly, reports 30,092 emigrants from Canada in 2026 Q1. The table’s downloadable CSV identifies these as Emigrants, with Canada as the geography and persons as the unit.
Confirmed: Adding the last four quarters in the same official table — 2025 Q2, 2025 Q3, 2025 Q4 and 2026 Q1 — gives 120,916 emigrants. In the table period checked, both the Q1 number and rolling four-quarter total are record highs.
Confirmed source trail: The Facebook post appeared in the public BetterBC group, shared by Trevor Scott from a public post by Ewa Czekalewska. It cited Better Dwelling’s June 18 article, “Canadians Are Leaving At The Fastest Pace In 74 Years.” The Better Dwelling figures match the official StatCan values NewsForBC extracted from the table CSV.
What needs caution
Not proven by the public figures alone: why each person left. The StatCan table counts emigrants; it does not, by itself, prove whether the driver was housing, taxes, politics, health care, career opportunity, family reasons, retirement, cost of living, or a combination.
Also not proven: the Facebook post’s wider political claim that the real number is double or triple, or that specific demographic/employment-policy claims explain the trend. Those are arguments, not numbers verified by the table.
Why B.C. readers should care
British Columbia is one of the provinces most exposed to the pressures behind this debate: unaffordable housing, young-worker mobility, U.S. job pull, professional licensing friction, high tax and cost-of-living anxiety, and the question of whether Canada can keep the people it educates.
If 120,916 citizens and permanent residents left Canada in the last four reported quarters, that is not a fringe statistic. It is a signal that public policy should stop treating people as interchangeable population units. Immigration can increase headline population, but it does not automatically replace lost entrepreneurs, doctors, tradespeople, engineers, nurses, founders, or young families who decide the Canadian bargain no longer works.
The question governments should answer
The federal and provincial governments should publish a clearer emigration dashboard: age, province of origin, citizenship/permanent-resident status, destination country where available, occupation/education indicators where legally collected, and return-migration rates. Without that, Canadians are left arguing from partial numbers, political anecdotes and social-media screenshots.