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Official forecasts for population growth are likely undershooting, says CIBC World Markets — warning that this raises the risk the challenges of overstretched housing markets and infrastructure will be larger than expected, too.

In a new report, the bank’s economists suggest that while Canada’s record population growth has eased in recent months, the current projections from Statistics Canada may be unrealistically low.

“The actual growth in the coming years is likely to be notably stronger than officially projected,” it said.

As a result, “We fear that we are in a process of repeating past mistakes,” the report said — when it comes to planning for the scale of investment in housing and infrastructure that will be needed for the years ahead.

For instance, the report said that StatCan is currently expecting 0.3% population growth this year, followed by a 0.2% contraction in 2026, which it believes will prove to be too low, “due to dual factors of overestimating the number of [non-permanent residents (NPRs)] leaving the country and undercounting asylum seekers and ‘others’.”

The report noted that while official projections assume that people with student and temporary worker visas that expire automatically leave the country, that’s not necessarily the case.

Many people will expired visas “actually remain in Canada and retain employment, long after their visas expire,” it said.

While some of these people gain permanent resident status, many stay while they wait for new visas to be issued, which is a status that’s not recognized in the official statistics, it noted.

Additionally, the number of asylum seekers will likely remain close to historic norms, the report said, as the government has limited latitude to reduce this segment of the population in the short term.

Adjusting for these factors, the report projects that population growth this year will actually be 1.1%, followed by 1% growth in 2026, “notably stronger than the 0.3% and negative 0.2% currently officially projected,” it said.

This has implications for the economy, and government and corporate planning.

“In addition to distorting statistics such as GDP per capita or productivity growth, the undercounting of the Canadian population can potentially worsen the housing supply shortage that is the core reason for the country’s housing affordability crisis,” the report said.

“Governments and developers do not build for populations that are not projected. Exclusions of numerous subsets of those living and working in Canada from the official population, as is the case today, materially leads to suboptimal planning,” it said.