USRI students combat Canada's declining population
Two Western undergraduates in the summer research internship program are helping sociologist Michael Haan build better evidence on immigration as Canada’s population declined in 2025.
Canada’s population fell on an annual basis in 2025 for the first time on record. Michael Haan, a Western sociology professor and director of Western’s Statistics Canada Research Data Centre, says official immigration statistics arrive three to four years late, so researchers are still working with 2023 data.
Haan supervises fourth-year Social Science students Aphrodite Podonis and Beniamin Kowal, two of 322 students in Western’s Undergraduate Summer Research Internships program. Each internship is a paid, full-time 16-week commitment. Their work supports Haan’s proposed Canadian Immigration Intelligence Unit, which starts with building a population register.
Podonis, whose family emigrated from Greece in the 1970s, is travelling to Greece to interview migration scholars, policy workers and non-governmental organizations about migrant flows. Kowal is taking a two-week web-scraping course through the University of Essex to fill gaps in newcomer data using public sources.
The students and faculty will present their work at a virtual exhibition at the end of the summer.
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