A young Syrian refugee looks at the Canadian flag held by her father as they arrive at Pearson Toronto International Airport in December 2015. Most of Canada's population growth in recent years is due to immigration. (Mark Blinch/Reuters)

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TODAY:

• Canada's population has topped 37 million, according to new data released this morning by Statistics Canada, and is growing faster than it ever has before
• New York State's attorney general has filed suit against the President of the United States, alleging that his non-profit Donald J. Trump Foundation was operated more like a slush fund than a charity
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Canada by the numbers

Canada's population has topped 37 million, according to new data released this morning by Statistics Canada, and is growing faster than it ever has before.

It took just two years and two months to add one million more people to the national population, which stood at 37,067,011 as of April 1.

That's the shortest period on record for an increase of such magnitude.

Canada logged 93,944 births in the first three months of 2018. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

By comparison, it took 17 years — from 1867 to 1884 — for Canada to add its first post-Confederation million, growing from 3.46 million to 4.48 million people.

Then it took 20 more years to add the next million.

• Canada's population didn't hit double-digit millions until 1929.
• By the end of the Second World War in 1945, the country was home to just 12 million people.
• The Centennial year, 1967, was when the population surpassed 20 million.

In its first 50 years as an independent country, Canada added 4.6 million people. Then 14 million more over the next half-century. And now an additional 17 million people over the past 51 years.

Canada's recent growth has everything to do with immigration.

In the first quarter of this year alone, new migrants and non-permanent residents accounted for 85 per cent of the population increase — 88,120 out of the 103,157 additions. Which is all the more striking, given that Canada logged 93,944 births and a record number of deaths — 78,907 — in the first three months of 2018.

Most of the new arrivals are moving to big cities, accounting for 78 per cent of the total population growth. As of last July, seven in 10 Canadians — some 25.9 million people — were living in what StatsCan calls a "census metropolitan area," and 35 per cent of all Canadians lived in the greater Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver regions.

But even by that measure, Canada's population remains concentrated in the centre of the country, with Ontario and Quebec having a total of 22.6 million residents. In fact, Ontario's 2017 population of 14,193,384 was greater than the combined population of all four Atlantic provinces and all four Western provinces.

A sign marking the Canada-United States border is seen on railway tracks leading to Surrey, B.C. The U.S. has a growth rate of 0.71 per cent, more than double Canada's 0.3 per cent for the first quarter of 2018. (Chris Helgren/Reuters)

The only province to see its population decline in the first months of 2018 was Newfoundland and Labrador.

In terms of world population, Canada now ranks 38th out of 233 nations, just behind Iraq and Poland, and just ahead of Afghanistan and Morocco.

China with 1.4 billion people, continues to top the list, followed by India's 1.3 billion residents.

The United States, which ranks No. 3 with 327 million people, added 2.3 million new residents in 2017 alone. It has a growth rate of 0.71 per cent, more than double Canada's 0.3 per cent for the first quarter of 2018.