Canada's Divorce Rate Hit a 50-Year Low. Vancouver Is the City Explaining Why.

Let's start with the number that's technically true and quietly out of date.

Canada's divorce rate fell to 5.6 per 1,000 married people in 2020, the lowest it's been since 1973, according to a Vanier Institute of the Family report drawing on Statistics Canada data. That's down from 12.7 per 1,000 in 1991 — a decline of more than half in three decades. It's the country's version of the stat every nation seems to reach for eventually: proof, on the surface, that marriages are getting more stable.

The same report immediately complicates it. Just 44% of Canadians over 15 were married in 2021, down from 54% in 1991 — and Statistics Canada hasn't published national divorce figures at all since 2020, meaning every "current" divorce rate cited for Canada today is, strictly speaking, five years out of date. More than one in five cohabiting Canadian couples, 22.7%, are in common-law relationships that don't show up in divorce statistics at all when they end. The Vanier Institute's own conclusion was blunt: divorce statistics don't provide a complete picture of relationships ending, because an increasing share of relationships in Canada were never structured in a way the data tracks.

Vancouver is where that gap between "the divorce rate is low" and "relationships are healthy" gets easiest to see, because Vancouver has a mechanism explaining exactly why fewer people are reaching marriage in the first place — and it isn't cultural.

A 2025 study from the University of British Columbia, examining household formation across Canadian cities, found that in 1981, more than two-thirds of Toronto and Vancouver residents aged 25 to 29 lived independently, in their own household. By 2021, that share had collapsed to roughly one-third in Vancouver and just over a quarter in Toronto. The researchers found a specific, quantifiable relationship behind the drop: for every $1,000 increase in median rent, the share of young adults forming their own household falls by 23%. This wasn't a shift in what people wanted. It was rent pricing an entire life stage out of reach.

Vancouver's rent and price data make the mechanism obvious. The average home in Metro Vancouver now costs roughly $1.14 million, requiring close to 90% of a typical household's income to service, according to 2025 market analysis — making it, by a wide margin, Canada's least affordable city. Over the past 30 years, home prices in Vancouver rose 142% while incomes rose 34%, according to housing affordability research citing Canadian Real Estate Association and Statistics Canada figures. The price-to-income ratio for an average home climbed from roughly 8x in 1994 to about 14x in 2024. One in three British Columbians told pollsters in 2024 they were considering leaving the province specifically over affordability.

Put the UBC finding next to Vancouver's price data and the story stops being about marriage or divorce at all. It's about a much earlier stage that most dating advice skips entirely: whether two people can afford to build an independent life together before a relationship has any chance of reaching the point where marriage, or divorce, becomes a relevant question. A generation of Vancouverites that would once have moved into their own apartment at 25, dated from a position of independence, and eventually moved in with a partner is instead staying in shared housing, with roommates, or with family — not because they don't want a relationship, but because the UBC data shows almost mechanically that rising rent removes people from the pool of adults who can form a household at all.

This reframes what Canada's historically low divorce rate is actually measuring in a city like Vancouver. It isn't evidence that Vancouver couples are unusually good at making marriage work. It's a downstream effect of a much larger group of Vancouverites never getting financially independent enough to cohabit, marry, or divorce in the first place — the same distortion at the root of the original "50% of marriages end in divorce" myth, just running in the opposite direction and through a housing market instead of a culture shift.

None of this means Vancouver singles have given up on partnering off — the UBC researchers found newcomers to an area were actually more likely to form independent households than long-term residents, likely because they arrive without an existing shared living arrangement to fall back into. It means the real obstacle in this city was never really about relationships breaking down. It's about how few Vancouverites can currently afford to build one on solid enough ground to test.