Canada’s population will grow at a record pace thanks to an influx of immigrants and temporary residents, the national statistics office said on Wednesday, forecasting a doubling of the population in 26 years if the trend continues, AFP reported.

As of January 1, Canada was home to 39,566,248 people, a million more than the year before, an increase not seen since 1957. The main source is immigration.

Canada recorded “by far” the highest rate of population growth (+2.7%) among the G7 countries, Statistics Canada said in a press release, continuing a trend that began several years ago.

“Almost all the countries with the highest population growth rate (…) were in Africa,” the institute explains.

With unemployment near an all-time low of 5 percent and an aging population, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has doubled its immigration target since coming to power in 2015.

The country welcomed 437,180 immigrants in 2022, and now plans to welcome 500,000 each year through 2025 to make up for labor shortages.

The number of temporary residents with work or study permits also increased to 607,782.

The Canadian government also announced on Wednesday the extension until next year of the emergency asylum program for Ukrainian refugees, which was supposed to end next week.

Authorities recently unveiled new measures to ease the immigration process for Turkish and Syrian nationals already in Canada, a month after the earthquake killed more than 50,000 people in the two countries.

According to Statistics Canada, increased immigration “may create additional challenges for some regions of the country related to housing, infrastructure and transportation, as well as the provision of services to the population.”