OTTAWA: Canada took in a record number of immigrants in the 12 months ended July 1, the government statistical agency announced Wednesday.
"The country had not received such a large number of immigrants in a single annual period since the early 1910s during the settlement of Western Canada," Statistics Canada said in a statement.
The arrival of 31,000 Syrian refugees since last November helped push the figure up to 320,932, and break a previous peak set in 2009-2010 when migrants flocked to Canada to escape economic hardships.
During that period, Canada had just gotten through the worst global recession since the Great Depression relatively unscathed, and welcomed more than 270,000.
This latest wave of migrants also helped to push up the Canadian population by 1.2 percent to more than 36 million.
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